Divi’s Path to Mass Adoption
Many people ask us “how and when” Divi will achieve mass adoption when Bitcoin and others have failed, so I wanted to address that as clearly as possible. Not that I have a crystal ball and can see the future, but there are many aspects of this challenge that many are not aware of that I wanted to bring attention to. I’m hoping that for those taking the time to read this, you’ll see we have a good plan, and want to join the Divi community and be part of making history with us.
Bitcoin Is Not a Currency and is Not Our Competition
Satoshi Nakamoto and friends created Bitcoin to be a currency, but that hasn’t happened and probably never will. That’s because it’s been taken over by the miners, who want high transaction fees of $2 or more. They see BTC as a “store of value” and it’s now fairly clear that it never needs to be used to buy hamburgers when it can instead be a digital form of gold. While there’s some effort to create the “Lightning Network” to make it run faster, it’s unlikely that the fees will ever go down and anyway, Divi will already have a better, faster, and cheaper system than Lightning. I mention all this because people ask me how Divi is going to compete with Bitcoin in mass adoption, when there are already millions of Bitcoin users, and the answer is that it isn’t, because we’re targeting different markets. Bitcoin will be “mass adopted”, but as a store of value, not as a currency used for day-to-day transactions.
Atomic Swaps and DEXs
Also known as Atomic Cross Chain Atomic Swaps or HTLCs (Hashed Time Locked Contracts), this is an incredibly important technology that allows trustless exchange of digital assets. Combined with DEXs (Decentralized Exchanges), sellers will be able to receive any cryptocurrency they want while the buyer pays with a different one. What this means is that the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem will be much more fluid and easier for people. Stores will no longer need to choose which cryptocurrencies to accept and fear missing out on potential sales. Meanwhile, buyers don’t need to try to have various cryptocurrencies available for different vendors, but can instead just use one.
More importantly, this means that every cryptocurrency can survive, and we don’t need to worry that one of them will somehow dominate, to the exclusion and eventual death of all others, like in the old tech world where VHS killed Betamax.
More on Atomic Swaps: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hashed_Timelock_Contracts
More on DEXs: http://www.cryptomorrow.com/2017/11/06/decentralized-exchanges-will-solve-problems
Tribes and Brands
If we understand that all cryptocurrencies can exist in the future, then that means marketing and branding will play a very important role, because consumer choice becomes important. For that reason, Divi’s logo and marketing are designed to appeal to millenials, and have a surf or sports look. We can expect that “coolness” will play an important role in which cryptocurrencies are widely adopted.
Ease of Use
Most importantly, when all cryptocurrencies can be used, we expect that those that are easiest and safest will be the most widely adopted, especially by newbies. Divi is especially focused on this aspect of our Smart Wallet™. With 99% of the population still yet to come into the crypto space, our expectation is that many of them will seek an experience that’s both “cool” and “easy”, so therein lies our big opportunity by being both. Given the choice, why would anyone choose a difficult, painful, and risky cryptocurrency when they could choose Divi?
Getting the Word Out Through Mainstream Media
“Build it and they will come” is definitely NOT our motto. We’ve all seen too many cryptocurrencies created by teams of great programmers who have no idea about marketing. They wrongly think that all they need to do is make some great technology and everyone is going to start using it. That happens in rare cases, but what’s more likely is that no one will notice among the massive noise in the crypto space, and meanwhile someone else who’s louder will take their idea to market.
The Divi Project has a “secret weapon” that I think no other cryptocurrency has, which is that we have Heidi Krupp and her husband Darren Lisiten as part of the core of our team. They own Krupp Kommunications (kruppkommunications.com), a top NYC publicity company, and their team is working every day, reaching out and educating the media about the barriers to mass adoption and how Divi will have the solution. This story takes a while to create, and will reach critical mass when we’re ready to release the mainnet (Divi blockchain protocol) in 2018. You will see us a lot in the media, such as on both Cheddar TV and Bold TV, currently scheduled for January 2018 where I’ll be interviewed along with Tim Sanders. I’ll usually post upcoming media appearances in this document: https://medium.com/diviproject/upcoming-press-for-the-divi-project-88532ca552f3 Keep in mind that this is very unusual. There are hundreds of cryptocurrencies out there now, and you’ll rarely see any of them in the news except for Bitcoin and Ethereum, unless it’s something to do with crime or hacking. We have already been in Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc, and many more, which should tell you something about our team’s unique ability to get mainstream media excited about the Divi story.
YouTube Video Series
Another way we are already working towards mass adoption, is to go after newbies with Kelsey Matheson’s video series on YouTube. We will have more YouTube videos and series, such as explanation and problem-solving videos that target common issues that people have in crypto in general and of course specifically with Divi.
Women are an Essential part of a Mass Adoption Strategy
Women account for 70% of household spending, so getting them on board the crypto wagon is essential to mass adoption. This is particularly challenging because only 5–7% of current crypto users are female. Although there are many reasons for this, the general consensus is that women are more conservative and practical when it comes to money (which has been reported also makes them slightly better investors, on average, than men.) Making crypto easier is thus very important for this.
Women also are more likely to ask “So what can I do with this?” than men, who are more likely to enjoy the challenge that crypto use presents, and more satisfied with simply investing it on exchanges and not worrying about actually buying something with it. Since women are making more day to day shopping purchases, it’s natural for them to want to spend it on something.
Also, more women than men are opening small home businesses, as shown by the explosive growth of Etsy. Part of our plan is to tap into this by offering an alternative or additional market within our Smart Wallet.
To help us target women with Divi, we’ve been working on building an advisory panel of top women executives and leaders in technology. Women are currently missing out on the world’s largest transfer and creation of wealth, and so bringing more women into crypto should be seen as an essential part of gender equality.
More on this here: https://medium.com/diviproject/a-serious-problem-women-are-missing-out-on-crypto-fa322681c5ec
Marketplace
As mentioned above, having something to buy with Divi is essential to bringing the masses into it. For that reason we are already reaching out to online retailers to bring some into the Divi family so that they’ll be ready to take Divi once the mainnet goes live. This effort will accelerate as we get closer to that time, and we hope to have at least one retailer in most of the important categories that our target market is likely to want to buy. We can provide a directory and map within the Smart Wallet to help Divi holders locate vendors who accept our coin and are near to them, or have the products that they want.
This is simply a listing service, but that will eventually be turned into something more like an Etsy or Amazon, based on a Peer-to-Peer decentralized network run by the masternodes.
Strategic Partnerships
Most big tech companies have been loathe to accept bitcoin because they’re so focused on a great user experience, and bitcoin is incapable of providing that. Divi’s blockchain has user data that allows us to simplify and humanize the transaction process. Some of our advisers are extremely well connected to huge businesses that are looking for a solution like ours, so as soon as we have a demo, you can be assured that it will get into the right hands. The leaders of these tech companies are looking for a solution so they can bring crypto to their millions of customers, and we intend to provide that for them.
The Biggest Challenge: The Crypto “Onramp”
With all that said, the most difficult hurdle on the path towards mass adoption is how people get into cryptocurrencies in the first place. Everyone who has taken the crypto plunge has experienced trying to explain the process to a newbie, which involves several complicated steps of first registering at someplace like Coinbase, then learning how to use a crypto wallet, then finally an exchange to be able to convert bitcoin to an altcoin like Divi. This process is far too difficult and until there’s an easier way, newbies won’t enter this sphere. This isn’t a challenge that Divi alone can solve, but luckily the entire cryptocurrency space is working on it because with this one, we’re all in the same pickle.
One possible solution is to partner with banks to offer ATMs in major cities, so that people can put in dollars and get out a card that has a private key to a wallet with DIVI in it. Or, the same banks can offer that service as part of their online banking. Some of Divi’s advisors have very close contacts with many banks, which will help us reach out to them for partnership. Our insiders have told us that banks have basically accepted the inevitability of cryptocurrency growth, and are now focused on how they can profit from it, rather than trying to stop this very disruptive wave. Divi’s easy-to-use wallet and platform will be a potential solution for them to offer to their clients in a mutually beneficial way.
A better way is to build an exchange into our Smart Wallet, that completes the various steps using the APIs of the exchanges or DEXs, to be able to use a credit card to buy DIVI through the wallet itself. The wallet will be easily downloaded into their web browser.
Conclusion
The mass adoption of cryptocurrencies is perhaps the biggest financial opportunity that the world has ever seen. Tens or even hundreds of trillions of dollars of fiat currencies and monetary instruments are “going digital” over the next several years. Divi has a unique and flexible solution, the team to build and promote it, and after our successful ICO, now the resources to make it all happen.
