Introducing The Word M&A To The Cryptocurrency World
Cryptocurrencies have been a hot topic lately, with the rise of Bitcoin and practically every altcoin surging in valuation and reaching ATH. These digital assets are like roller coasters going up and down since 2009 with the creation of bitcoin, thus recently suffering a healthy and cyclical recession to normalize prices. Volatility, mass adoption and integration, and the promise to disrupt literally any industry has attracted top notch talent to progress the technology and fulfill Satoshi Nakamoto’s dream of a secure, decentralized and connected world. From a Cypherpunk Manifesto to Digital Cash and e-money, the world has been in demand of a truly decentralized peer to peer transaction method complementing the banking system. Bitcoin was the first successful peer to peer cross border transaction network.
In 2014, Vitalik Buterin introduced Ethereum and created a platform to develop decentralized apps and smart contracts. Now new companies are popping up, raising funds via ICOs and traditional investing to develop decentralized internets (Blockstack), decentralized storage networks (Filecoin) and direct content creator to reader payment platforms (BAT).
Ambitious projects trying to solve big problems need funds, talent, ship products, and communities to thrive and succeed. Many projects have been labeled as scams due to its inability to produce anything and run away with funds. These projects promise to tackle ambitious problems. There is a lack of blockchain knowledge and talent even though according to Angellist, blockchain jobs have increased in 2018.
With a scarcity of competent blockchain developers worldwide, it seems like good projects only have two to three “qualified” blockchain developers with 6+ years of experience in the field and a vast knowledge in cryptography, politics, economics and everything needed to boost an early stage promise. With ICO funding, these projects have been able to hire decent to good developers with some knowledge in Solidity and other blockchain development programs and 2–3+ years in the field.
Six years of experience in blockchain development might not sound like a lot but due that the creation of bitcoin only happened nine years ago, and Ethereum introduced Solidity four years ago, we still need some years of maturity for the decent-good talent to become “experts” in the field and be able to build their own blockchain and not fork it.
Communities are important in the blockchain world because we need people to work together and build better codes, products, and solutions.
Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin,and Dash have built tremendous and collaborative communities of developers working non stop to find scaling solutions for their favorite cryptocurrencies to grow. Bitcoin forked into Bitcoin Cash, Diamond, Gold, Private and other dozens names but the community that kept still, invented the Lighting Network which promises to fix some of its biggest problems (transaction time, size, and fees). If bitcoin wouldn’t have had such a large community staying put, would it be able to develop Lighting Networks?
We need communities to work together to solve similar problems, not split and compete. There are not enough qualified developers to work on difficult tasks, if every community splits, how can we offer blockchain powered solutions to the world without having an actual product? Blockchain would become just a fad and the attention it has gotten will die down and all the hard work will be useless because blockchain tech will have no use.
Many blockchain projects are working on similar solutions. Bitcoin (bitcoin, bitcoin cash, bitcoin gold, bitcoin private, bitcoin diamond, litecoin), Private transactions (Monero, Zcash, Electroneum), Smart contract and Dapps platforms (Ethereum, NEO, EOS, Qtum, Stratis, Cardano, Lisk), decentrizled exchanges (Kyber Networks, Bitshares, Lykke, Ox, Loopring, Komodo). These are some of the biggest needs right now under development in the blockchain world. Be the first to succeed and you open the gates to a motherload of opportunities. What happens if we keep forking and not succeed? I understand the benefits of a community split, but it shouldn’t become a trend anytime there is a conflict of interest or different points of view, Work them out!
I would like to introduce a not so revolutionary term to the blockchain world: M&A. This technological advancement is meant to connect the world together. We have been focusing so much on decentralization and bringing the power to the people, but we have forgotten to unite and work together to ship and offer ready to use solutions.
Aside from the technology, companies merge because of branding and talent provided with the newly formed companies. Blockchain related companies without cryptocurrencies have merged or acquired other companies like Coinbase acquiring Earn.com and Circle acquiring Poloniex. Earns CEO Balaji Srinivasan will become Coinbases CTO to bring the digital asset exchange to new heights.
Imagine if the geniuses and visionaries of Charlie Lee, Vitalik Buterin, and Dan Larimer, combined powers and work together with their communities on the first layer of creating the perfect blockchain network. This will pave the way for other developers to create their Dapss and smart contracts under the perfect blockchain. Regulators will have a less headache due that they only have to concentrate on giving legislative tags to one cryptocurrency project and not thousands working on the same thing but considered a little different. Things would move so much faster! Again this would be a perfect world, and competition is healthy to thrive, but not when you are creating an infrastructure and other are waiting and counting on it to be perfect so they can build their applications.We need to combine powers to solve the pieces of the puzzle, not that take piece and try to solve a new puzzle.
How many cryptocurrencies actually have a functioning product? EOS is still on Testnet, Tron only announces “strategic partnerships” on twitter and a new bitcoin keeps popping up every month! When will we start seeing cryptocurrencies merging to collaborate in common goals? 90% of startups fail, so will cryptocurrencies projects because of their distinct reason. It’s really hard to carry a revolutionary promise, money is not the only factor to fulfill a vision!
Keep tune as I write about M&A solutions I would like to offer and discuss with the community!
**Disclaimer: There are a lot of collaborative consortiums such as Hyperledger, ERC20, NEP 5 etc working together. Merging powers will give two projects their full and utmost attention to solve a common problem.
Lets collaborate to build a better tomorrow!
By Menajem Benchimol
