Part #1 of 3: Why the mass market is not investing in cryptoassets? Yet!

Simply put, it’s bloody complicated.

Yes, it has been the talk of the town for the past year or so, “Bitcoin” this “Ethereum” that. You would be hard pressed to go to a social gathering or turn on the nightly news without a cryptocurrency discussion. Most all major television networks now have a segment in their finance or business shows on cryptocurrencies and blockchain. Believe it or not the blockchain has the potential of being the next version of the internet , the web 3.0. It could impact our lives in more ways than we can even imagine today. It is similar to the early days of the internet or the early days of smartphones — today we can’t live without them.

This nascent industry grew from its hobbyist and revolutionist grass roots to a global industry with cryptoassets being valued at over $400 billion and as many involved believe, growing materially over the next decade. Needless to say amidst the hyper growth and volatility, a group of insiders have made millions, even billions in the process. As of spring 2018, you have a full array of participants ranging from IBM, governments, MIT, Goldman Sachs and a plethora of entrepreneurs in every corner of industry.

The investors to date have been relatively limited to tech savvy types, high risk takers and early technology adopters. This group have been tolerant to the high hurdles required to get involved in owning cryptoassets. There are several challenges limiting the general public or mass market from participating, the majority of them are rooted in the fragmented user experience and lack of tools that make entering the market and managing your assets in a rational way.

So what does it look like if you want to enter the market, let’s say owning a portfolio of 6 different cryptoassets. Well, you would need to set up;

• 2+ wallet or exchange accounts (Think Etrade or Charles Schwab times 2)
• 2+ KYC processes (identity verification)
• 1 My Ethereum Wallet — a private wallet to hold your non exchange assets :)
• You need a plan to hold your private keys ( a secret protecting your wallets)
• Depending on what you want to invest in, your local currency may not work, so figure in some exchanging in between a few currencies and the associated costs

We’ll stop there, I think you got the “Bloody Complicated “ part already.

So while the industry itself is booming and useful products and services are starting to hit the streets, which will likely drive growth even faster, it is just too complicated for the mass market to get involved as things stand.

This is why we are developing B21, our goal is to make cryptoasset investing approachable to the mass market, to ensure it is easy to on board, easy to choose assets to invest in and easy to manage your portfolio. In the next segment, we will talk about how we will achieve this and in part three of this segment we will cover our big picture community impact.

Stay tuned….