The Consensus between the technology and the trading
When I planned my trip to NY for Blockchain Week 2018 I decided to visit the two biggest events — Ethereal and Consensus and to write something about the experience, the announcements and what I have learned about the market, the technology, and more importantly — the people.
After visiting Ethereal Summit I was really impressed by where Ethereum and its community are going, and I briefly described the event on Medium.
A week after the second conference I am still wondering what to think and how to evaluate the Consensus experience.
I will start with a brief story about why I joined the space. In 2013 a friend of mine told me about Bitcoin and how this amazing new decentralized cryptocurrency will change the world. I didn’t buy any. I was too busy with my traditional business, the tech startup I was in, and a bunch of other everyday boring things that were taking all my attention literally, not giving me the opportunity to see what is about to come. Then, sometime later I read more about blockchain and started digging into the technology. Even though I saw great potential for it down the line, I did not invest myself fully because from my perspective I could not contribute much to the development of the community. Sure, I saw the potential for profits using my business experience as a foundation to become a good trader, a great one even. However, that’s not my cup of tea, and I decided to pass on the immediate opportunity in the trading and continue doing what I do best — building teams and companies that bring value. What didn’t pass was my interest in blockchain, following the space closely and getting more in-depth in the theory made me eager for its practical implementation.
So logically, working on my travel start-up Tripsy I started to research this relatively new thing — Ethereum, and its smart contracts’ possible applications and implications for our project. I found out solutions for problems that we couldn’t solve thinking in the old-fashioned centralized way. Moreover — I fully realized the potential on the new way of organizing and motivating the creative human power.
Having found practical applications for blockchain in my business, I was sucked into this whole new world of opportunities.
Not for short-term profit, but for long-term change.
The whole picture got much more clear to me, and I was ready to fully invest myself into this new way of creating value and start my new life as a blockchain believer, but remaining the same entrepreneur who focuses on the product and what it gives to consumers.
Why am I telling this story? Thinking about what I saw during Consensus I think there were both the crypto believers that really want to change the world for good sharing the space with the Dark side of the industry. Yes, the Dark side is strong and growing among the others!
At Consensus, most of the people were talking about ICOs, but not about ideas, about projects and their real value proposition, they were speaking about profits. The strongest evidence for me was the conversations I had with people in various roles in the community and the outcomes from them.
Don’t get me wrong; I met really cool people, visionaries that actually want to help others and to bring value to the industry. I spoke with people like Joe Lubin and Vinny Lingham that are indeed creating a whole new world for all of us.
But, that was not the majority. Maybe I am wrong or maybe I was searching for the wrong people. Let me tell you some examples.
A guy approached us on a rooftop party we were at and asked us what we are doing. So while I was telling him what we do, talking about our travel project (Check out 15toGO website if you are interested) he didn’t actually listen what I am saying or showing on my phone. He only asked one thing — HOW MUCH YOU ARE PLANNING TO RAISE?
When I answered that we are not focused on fixing our Hard Cap but mostly on polishing our Token Economy, Whitepaper and building a strong team he looked disturbed. He asked me again about the funding goal, then a friend of mine who is not part of the project just shot to him something like 10 million and the guy started to smile greedily. And then his question came:
“Why losing time for creating a real project and raising a lot of money when you can raise around 2–3 million, then pump it and sell. We did that with one project; it doesn’t even use blockchain but a MySQL server. Everyone was happy.”
He even showed us the graph on Coinmarketcap. When we told him that we plan to build the core product before the TGE he told us that we are in a huge mistake and just took off to another table and group of people ready to buy in. We asked ourselves are we mistaken assuming we should deliver a real product that people will love to use, and are we sure that we understood the man right.
And let me tell you another story. I met many people that claimed to be investors in ICOs. Most of them were there for finding sweet deals with projects that they have heard about. And this is quite normal. When you get to know the people behind the project personally, you can better evaluate if your investment will be successful. But there comes the problem. Most of the “investors” don’t really care about the team or the project’s realization, but mostly for the short term opportunity for profit. What I say is that if you are the real investor and you believe in a project and the team behind it, you won’t think about selling when the 5x or the 10x is approaching, knowing that you are failing the team that you are investing in.
There are pretty great projects that couldn’t manage to have a stability of their token price because the short term investors are not really in for the project but for the short-term profit. And again, don’t get me wrong, this is not the biggest problem and in some point is quite good for the market because funds are moving fast and there is available capital for new teams and ideas.
But the real problem comes when this behavior is the standard for a whole industry and it actually damages the stability and the long-term growth. Projects are hostages of the pools and whales that are supposed to be their key partners, they need to sell a significant portion of tokens to early contributors that are not adding value to the product’s success. The majority of “consultants” are focusing on the sale but can’t actually help you with the concept, finding the market fit or creating a successful go to market strategy. But YES, they can help you with getting your tokens sold.
Another interesting conversation with the manager of an ICO consulting agency happened during Consensus. When I explained our idea, showed our progress with the development of the app and I mentioned that we already raised some funds that we are using on the product he was literally amazed why I am losing time for building a product to show to investors while he can help us raise 10–15 million and then we can proceed with the product development.
I immediately answered that we don’t want to use the TGE only for fundraising but mostly for the initial user growth that can help us solve the chicken and egg problem with marketplaces. I am not sure he even understood what I was saying (If you don’t understand it quite enough you can learn more here).
And again — Don’t get me wrong, raising money without a product is OK. But creating an industry where the investors are driven by FOMO and the success is not correlated with delivery is pretty much unstable and ready to blow any minute.
That doesn’t mean I am not happy what is happening in Crypto, in my opinion, this is still the biggest opportunity for mankind to solve some of the key problems we as a global community are facing. But I believe in people who are creating, which results in making well-deserved profits. I don’t believe in people who are promising to create, after profiting.
