A divided crypto world? Blockchain’s best use cases from those actually building revolutionary products

The bubble

There’s a lot of hype around this blockchain bubble, but I want to understand where the technical stack sits. What has actually been built? What will be built by interesting open source community projects and perhaps the public and private sectors?

As a well-known VC (with a technical background) noted this week on a start-up community WeChat group, there are some seriously talented developers building things around the world in the blockchain space, from Eastern Europe to Africa. This means that in a year or two and we will be able to separate viable solutions from bogus ICOs.

There is a divide in the crypto world between the day traders and the believers. The economics of investment in the NEO platform best illustrates this bubble:

“Perhaps the speech made by NEO’s founder Da Hongfei during the TokenSky Blockchain Conference can best illustrate the froth and euphoria in ICOs. NEO, launched in 2015, is the seventh biggest traded cryptocurrency in the world in terms of market cap. With over US$4 billion in market cap, NEO raised 2,100 and 6,120 bitcoins in two phases of its ICO in 2015 and 2016, respectively. Translating to fiat currency, NEO raised US$1.05 million and US$4 million, a fraction of the money being raised by the most mediocre ICO projects lately. In addition, founder Da said that NEO still hadn’t spent all the money it raised.”

Words are therefore often rightly bandied about in the media: “volatile”, “bubble” and “ponzi scheme”. But for the true believers there are use cases for blockchain that can change the world.

There are, of course, problems like commercial realities. With any use case, commercial realities will likely dictate whether these things get built to scale. From an economic point of view, what will be the driver for adoption?

And how long does it take for regulation to catch up to new technologies. In the case of ICOs in 2017, “anticipatory regulation” and “regulatory sandboxes” could not keep up globally.

So can blockchain really rocket us to a more open, transparent world? Or will institutional commercial realities and national regulatory divisions cut down this nascent revolution?

Time will tell. In the meantime I asked the bitfwd team, the developers of Tenzorum — the open source platform building a decentralised key management protocol — one question:

“What is the most interesting, revolutionary and novel blockchain use cases so far that have actually proven feasible?”

Daniel Bar, Tenzorum Co-Founder:

The most interesting use cases besides the underlying low level networks themselves (Ethereum, ZCash, bitcoin, Urbit, Cardano etc) are public masternode networks that include social features in the form of open governance.

The difference between the so called permissioned/consortium networks (Corda, Hyperledger, Ripple etc) to the public masternode networks is that they’re intended to support public communities and consumers rather than limited to enterprises that exclude the public at the infrastructure level.

Masternode networks encourage open and diverse forms of entrepreneurial and social proposals. It’s extremely inclusive yet meritocratic and results driven in the long run.

Masternode networks are really experimental. To a certain extent they’ve been proven viable, for example, the Dash masternode network is performing key tasks such as processing instant transactions, and voting on funds allocation to community initiatives.

While it’s still basic in structure it demonstrates a very powerful alternative governance structure. It’s a kernel of an idea that could disrupt organisational governance models. I believe it will evolve and replace many traditional centralised corporate governance models that are currently widespread. I’d event say it’s quite realistic masternode governance models can extend to perform some of the functions nation states are responsible for.

Moritz Neto, Tenzorum Co-Founder:

My take is on the philosophical side, it is more a feature than a user-case. But what fascinates me most is definitely the concept of Unstoppable Organisations.

The idea of creating a machine that is not relying on a single source of governance. Therefore ideas are not held hostage by a single point of failure or control. This is simply an insanely amazing paradigm shift in what we can achieve as collaborators of a decentralised network.

This feature enables clear user cases around social media, chat, news, etc. Basically, it allows users to utilise services without the fear of being shut down. It allows people to share their thoughts without the fear of being censored and allows anyone to fight for their ideas without fear of oppression. Information cannot be censored.

Working examples are Akasha and Steemit for social media, Aragon for governance and Ethereum as a general purpose computing machine. And soon we will have Tenzorum for key management and access control.

Alan Moore of V for Vendetta fame, noted: “Did you think to kill me? There’s no flesh and blood within this cloak to kill. There is only an idea. And ideas are bulletproof.” Today with the blockchain we know that ideas are not only bullet-proof, but also fundamentally unstoppable.

Max: As seen this week with the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal this is a timely idea.

Tom Terado, Tenzorum Community Manager:

The most interesting part for me is the use case of decentralised storage networks, particularly through protocols such as IPFS.

The Internet has been built on http for quite some time and it works but right now there is a new opportunity to re-architect and create a new ‘Internet’ which is much more efficient.

We can recreate it so everyone can act as ‘nodes’ (communication points) as opposed to having to pay centralised servers. We can participate in the 3rd Industrial Revolution of decentralisation and transparency.

Filecoin, is a great example of this, creating a new economy of trading computer storage space for coins. However decentralised storage is just one small part of the process.

It further extends to sharing and energy storage and creating new avenues for sustainability, which makes me super excited for the next 10–20 years.

Vincent Tran, Tenzorum Applied Mathematician, Blockchain Engineer:

The most interesting use case for me is blockchain as an identity management platform. This will allow us to unify many currently segmented systems for today.

Just imagine if you had one unified passport that was globally accepted around the world, stored in your phone and backed up in such a way that you could recover it if you lost your phone. This will greatly change the way we travel by removing the need to store and worry about documents.

It’ll even change the way we present our identity when challenged (e.g. at a club). You could even use this single source of identity as a login (similar to how we use Facebook/Google for logging in these days). Platforms like Civic actually let you do this right now.

Although we are quite far from it now, one day we may be able to create a globally interconnected world. Imagine this ID for refugees, which is being done, but with widespread adoption?

My take:

Use cases have now been conducted to use smart contracts on the blockchain to make sure workers get paid.

Imagine this example a Filipino lady, Marie is promised $2,000 USD per month to move to Dubai as a domestic helper. She gets there and is paid $200 per month working seven days a week and living in a basement. Blockchains can solve these problems with a locked in smart contract before Marie leaves and validated by a relevant agency.

Handshake, for example is working to improve the transparency of the recruitment process for migrant workers. They do this by enabling migrant employees to sign verified labour contracts from reputable recruitment agencies and employers on the Ethereum blockchain.

The US State Department is now also working with Coca-Cola on a project to create a blockchain secured workers’ registry that could be used to combat forced labor on Coke’s sugar supply chains.

2017 was a roller coaster. 2018 will now be critical to build scalable blockchain use cases. Open source platforms must now gain support from developers and build wider user adoption.

The use cases exist, the key issue will be scaling.

Max Parasol,

bitfwd decentralised tech correspondent

Tenzorum will be a UX, or user experience that is workable for even the tech illiterate to work with blockchains. A new way for the punters, the 老百姓 –the general public to understand and use blockchains.