Where will the blockchain technology be 5 years from now?
The future of blockchain technology is one of the questions on everybody’s lips: how will the tech evolve? What are its competitive advantages? What future applications do we foresee?
While we’re still looking for answers on these questions, one thing we know for sure: Blockchain — this immutable, encrypted, decentralized ledger — has the potential of making every centralized process, activity, and organization fully autonomous. This means we can eliminate intermediaries, authorities, and churn.
But what do we have to do actually to build blockchain as a sustainable, mass-adopted technology?
On July 2nd we’ve been on stage at IPSX Community Meetup #1 (a full review of the entire event is available here) 120+ people, speakers from 4 countries have attended the event in a beautiful venue, in Bucharest, and we’d like to thank them for the opportunity to share our vision with the Romanian blockchain community.
Samuel Kurtmann, the CEO & Founder of Impetus One, spoke about the lifeblood of blockchain: how this technology will evolve in the next 5 years. Here’s how we see it.
A throwback history…
What’s happening today with cryptocurrency and blockchain is reminiscent of the dot-com boom in the 90s and even a little bit earlier.
1903: “The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty — a fad.” — The president of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford’s lawyer, Horace Rackham, not to invest in the Ford Motor Co. One of the worst predictions in history.
1921: “The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?” David Sarnoff’s associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920's.
1946: “Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” — Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century Fox.
1959: “Before man reaches the moon, your mail will be delivered within hours from New York to Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail.” — Arthur Summerfield, U.S. Postmaster General.
1981: “Cellular phones will absolutely not replace local wire systems” Marty Cooper, inventor.
1995: “I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.” — Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com.
In a sense, that’s precisely what’s happening in the blockchain space today. History repeats itself. There’s no doubt about that! With all the talk about blockchain today, one might entirely dismiss it as a fad, but don’t let the hype fool you. Blockchain has legitimate potential to change the world, but it might also fail if it doesn’t manage to be mass adopted. Might remain a tool of the nerds.
3 critical steps to foster the development of blockchain technology
Like the early days of the Internet, some of the most significant and most impactful blockchain platforms will one day become mainstream in the everyday society. But it also means many others will fall by the wayside to leave only the most useful and innovative standing. The blockchain is not a miracle for every technological issue and, as history has shown, powerful innovations come with unintended consequences.
At the moment, it seems there are so many ways in which one can interact with the blockchain, and over the past three or four years, companies have been developing their own interfaces and smart contracts. But for these efforts to really scale on a global scale and be mass-adopted, there are three critical directions in which we need to invest in scaling up the blockchain:
1.It should be a lot more than just talking about Return On Investment
It’s vital to showcase all the use cases that businesses out there find in order to prove that blockchain is a technological infrastructure that can boost various industries. It’s not just another techie that helps with speculative transactions. To be more specific: new projects need to put blockchain in every individual’s pocket through apps and platforms that will help the large majority to get familiar with the concept of virtual currencies.
2. A better infrastructure based on market feedback
Let’s be frank: every day another blockchain startup is launched, but their days are counted. Many of them will fail, while some of them will not get enough traction to become sustainable. That’s because, to generate profit, a blockchain project needs traffic. And to get traffic, you need to reach mass-adoption.
And this is not as ambitious as it may sound. We already have the infrastructure. Take Ethereum for example: even with all its issues, transactions are still fast enough to satisfy its adopters. Not to mention our partners, Zilliqa, who, at 2400 transactions per second performance set a long road ahead for those who want to surpass them. When we take all these technologies with global potential, and no scalability concerns, the question is: how are we going to put all those blockchains to work? This is the actual challenge!
3. A more user-friendly UI, allowing less technical users to join
“If the user can’t use it, it doesn’t work.”
When we fell in love with the Internet, we didn’t fall for IP protocols, the backend, bytes or any other geeky thing. It was love at first sight with the e-mail, the photos people could publish from anywhere in the world, the ease of connecting with our families anytime we wanted.
Now, there’s nothing romantic in a high-risk, hard to understand technology, almost impossible to use by non-tech users. So here are a few vital elements to tick for blockchain to become mainstream:
- Develop user-friendly, intuitive, easy to use apps
- Clear and handy use cases
- A stable cryptocurrency
- Easy to understand protocols/payments systems
These are exactly the challenges we took into consideration when we developed Impetus One. We chose a stable and fast transaction system (our partners Zilliqa) and the main goal is to be able to put in people’s wallets a stable currency at a steady value for a long period of time.
Impetus One blockchain’s tech — the current technological development
Since you’ve reached this far, we’d like to share with you the fact that the web version of our MVP is finally ready, up, and running. We’re now working full speed to make this platform communicate as fast and as secure as possible with the mobile app, which will allow you to test our working prototype.
We’re getting prepared for our launch, and this will happen anytime soon. That’s why we’d love to keep you close and join us on Telegram for daily updates and other news about our project.
And by the way: we’re working on some missions that will blow your mind! Stay tuned!
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