Learning From the Outside

I’ve been in the blockchain space for almost 8 years now, my anniversary is coming up. But most of you would be mistaken if you thought that the only space I pay attention to and learn from is blockchain. Yes, blockchain has its own community with its own jargon — and the people involved in our space can be seen as fanatics for better or worse — but I believe that every blockchain company should look beyond our industry to other success stories and do their best to emulate and learn from them.

One of the companies that I have personally admired a lot and have learned from is Apple. But not for the reasons you may think.

Most people think of Apple in terms of its iconic co-founder, Steve Jobs, or the well-designed and uniquely crafted devices like the iPhone or the MacBook. For me, though, it was the idea of empowering developers by creating a platform to bring their ideas to life.

In short, the thing that has drawn me to Apple is their App Store.

Let me backtrack a moment and touch briefly upon the history of DECENT. Originally, the idea was that we wanted to be the first major publishing platform on blockchain for content providers. We wanted to allow writers, videographers, producers, designers, and any other form of creative people, to have a safe platform to publish their works and not have to worry about payment, fees, or any other complication. In many ways, this isn’t too different from what Apple did with their App Store.

They created a standardized, safe, procedural platform for all forms of developers to bring their imagination to life. At our core, we want to do the same thing with DECENT — on blockchain, of course.

The key fundamental values we have were also derived from companies like Apple. We believe in empowering our community as much as we can, by providing the tools for them to build whatever they want. Apple provided operating systems like OS X and iOS, we provide a decentralized blockchain with customizable developer tools to jumpstart their projects.

Another thing that I am really impressed by is their constant work, year after year, to improve their product. This usually results in their annual launch event in September, the most recent one took place on the 12th of September this year. While most people are engrossed with the sparkling new launches and updates, few people realize how much work it requires to innovate consistently, each time. Apple has made it clear that they take in the feedback from their community, and strives for innovation and improvement every year. I think that’s something we can all learn from.

To be clear, I’m not saying that eventually DECENT will be the Apple of blockchain — no, obviously there are many fundamental differences between us. For one, we are not currently looking to go into hardware, despite some blockchain companies exploring that option these days by building hardware for miners. Our focus is on building a strong and sustainable community centered around the development of dApps on DCore.

I earnestly hope that readers of this article, who are involved in blockchain, can take a minute and look at other industries. I believe that true innovation will happen only when we are able to learn from other industries and combine their successes with ours.