Looking Ahead to a Great 2020 with BlockStamp
Last week we looked back where the BlockStamp project has been in 2019.
This week it’s time for a couple high-level thoughts on where we’re going in 2020.
For a conceptual backdrop, we’re going to be mainly relying on Ryan Selkis’ outstanding Crypto Theses for 2020. We think you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better, more comprehensive overview of what is going on the cryptosphere at the moment. It’s definitely worth reading the whole thing if you’ve got some extra time on your hands over the holidays.
Let’s get to it.
First, we’re going to be evolving BlockStamp Game’s innovative on-chain fairness into more off-chain, fiat-friendly offerings.
In his commentary on crypto gambling (page 55 / 56 of the doc), Selkis suggests that which blockchain an online crypto casinos is built on will matter more than ever. The prediction is that for efficiency — and to distinguish themselves — casinos will build around a dedicated “sub-section” (specifically, Polkadot parachain or Cosmos zone) of a certain blockchain as opposed to the “main” EOS blockchain or Ethereum.
But what about a dedicated blockchain that has been optimized for gambling? That would be us :) The on-chain versions of BlockStamp Games run entirely on the BlockStamp blockchain. We’d say that will be an increasingly powerful reason for crypto “purists” to check us out.
But that’s not where the 2020 story for BlockStamp Games ends.
Selkis also identifies that crypto’s single biggest point of failure will be banking (page 64). Putting that into a broader context we’d say that is because not everyone is a crypto “purist.” The overwhelming majority of people run use fiat for their day-to-day necessities and fun like online gaming.
Accordingly, we’re going to make it easier for players to move between the traditional worlds of fiat- and regulator-friendly gaming and its new, blockchain-powered alternative. We’ll be aiming to get regulated and add possibilities for fiat wagers!
Second, we’re going to be ahead of the dissident tech curve.
According to Selkis (and others, as we’ve written about before) dissident tech seems like a great idea that users just aren’t all that interested in just yet. At scale, anyway.
There are some interesting projects underway aiming to replace the ICANN Domain Naming System (discussed on page 54 of the doc) but the whole space is still in its infancy for the most part.
At BlockStamp, we’ve also taken some initial back-end steps to supporting an ICANN replacement on the BlockStamp blockchain and — more importantly — have done back-end and front-end work on BlockStamp Communicator, as discussed in the previous article.
Will 2020 be a “tipping point” will be in terms of user demand for these types of privacy and censorship resistance solutions? Nobody can really say.
But when society does reach a tipping point, we want to be there with awesome solutions. We’re going to keep working on making the BlockStamp decentralized DNS and communicator app more usable in the meantime.
Onwards and upwards!
Happy Holidays everyone, and see you next year.
Make sure you’re part of the BlockStamp social community and feel free to ask any questions there!
About BlockStamp:
BlockStamp is a Bitcoin blockchain fork hosting an ecosystem of fair play apps, including a true-odds multiplayer crypto gambling platform, a decentralized marketplace listing optimizer, and a private messenger with sword-in-the-stone encryption (launching soon).
