🚀 Why Opoch? 🤔
Taking Cryptocurrencies to Everyone!
Opoch began as the culmination of our dream to keep building for the evolving internet over the coming decades.
We have been studying, teaching and building in the crypto ecosystem since mid ‘16. Somewhere during those times, the problem of mainstream crypto adoption intrigued us the most and Opoch is our answer to this exciting challenge 💪🏻
We are building Opoch for taking cryptocurrencies to everyone.
We believe it’s too fundamental a problem to not work towards solving immediately. We are individuals who are unafraid to be patient and spend time identifying our target. We love being focussed and determined to chase the impossible. Truth be told, having a meaningful gigantic challenge brings focus to us and prevents us from being easily swayed by market conditions, noise etc.
Opoch and The Dawn
Below, I’ve tried my best to bring structure to the chaos we have gone through and elaborate on our journey culminating with the crypto adoption competition, ‘The Dawn’.
Next Opportunity → Large Fast Growing Markets → Cryptocurrencies & Decentralized Technology → Challenge of Adoption at Scale → Opoch → The Dawn
Our Journey
For now, I’ll be naked and share an overview on our personal journey, staying sane in a crazy environment, identifying problems, challenges, opportunities and our resultant focus: Opoch
Chapter 1: We are FREE! 🧘🏻
Q2, 16: We are 3 co-founders and we got relieved of operational duties at our beloved startup (Zostel and ZO Rooms) during this period. I continued to be engaged in legal and financial discussions for another year. You won’t believe the energy such long drawn discussions drain unless you’ve experienced them yourselves 🤯
Taking my head out from the hospitality industry battle meant looking at myself from a deeper perspective to once again face the trivial questions of life, Who am I? What I am doing? What I want to do?
A change of environment has always been helpful for finding answers to such introspective questions for me. (I recommend traveling as an exercise for looking deeper at yourself with the help of external environment. My early convictions for Zostel were derived from personal experiences on the beaches of B̶a̶r̶c̶e̶l̶o̶n̶a̶ Badalona).
This time, it meant my rush to the place that I had romanticised for long. I had been fascinated to understand San Francisco, Silicon valley, since I was 10 years old. This time I was coming to spend some months and understand this organism myself.
Shoutout to my awesome friend Bhavya Agarwal for hosting us, broke friends 🙏🏻 😎
Chapter 2: Evaluating Global Opportunities 🚀
Q3, 16: After dropping by at several meetups, incubators and conferences, it was pretty obvious Silicon valley was hot 🔥 for AR/VR, ML/AI, Blockchain/Cryptocurrencies.
I toyed with all of them, talked with everyone I could to understand their perspectives, industry outlooks and gathered my reading list while being patiently uncomfortable to find the next target 🎯
Steemit: I wrote a Steem comic with iPhone 📱, an app called Prisma (was fad at the moment) and my helpless friends. I worked over a weekend, published the comic and it made over $200+. The Steemit interface sucked, user experience seemed bygone, but it worked, and the money was real. The impact of upcoming technology was visible, specially to an hungry entrepreneur 😋
For those still interested in the incomplete series: Steemit Comic Link
Bitcoin, Steemit, Ethereum, what more?
Ethereum was coming up and a simpler version of industry story I heard throughout SF, Crypto incubators and meetups was that,
Building over Bitcoin is akin to a coding over calculator, surely you can do it with the computer underneath, but would you really want to do it? 🤔
Whereas Ethereum with a Turing complete programming language is the true next big thing. Ethereum was hands down the darling of SV towards the end of ’16.
Chapter 3: Late to the Party 😕 ?
On learning front, we were scared and worried at first. As soon as we started diving deeper into Bitcoin, Blockchain, decentralisation, books, etc. we understood the potential, but also deep inside were jealous that we had missed the wave. Being 8 years late into an industry, that already has billions invested in projects and infrastructure might seem too late to dream the next Amazon and Google.
Understanding Deeper: 😃 Nope
It is only after you’ve spent time getting your hands dirty, understood the current status of market, community, technology, products that you can truly be calm, imagine the impossible and realize the massive gigantic opportunity that lies ahead of us. This is my single most advice to everyone who’s looking to build for the crypto ecosystem. I have been told Marc Anderseen felt he was late to the internet before building Netscape! So, what you’re feeling is just an excuse in your mind, 99% of work is ahead of us, if not more
If you’re under 30, and wonder how can you help build the next Google?Apple? Amazon? etc. let me inform you that the project must identify a large, fast growing potential market and fight hard to become a leader in it. This is in fact the hygiene level of qualification required for the club. Crypto is an easy sell for those who are ready to commit 30+ years to it, i.e. life 😇.
Chapter 4: FindEther
Q1, 17: We started building FindEther, a Dapp P2P marketplace over the Ethereum blockchain. We used the best practices, tools and successfully deployed our smart contracts over the world’s biggest decentralised computer, Ethereum Mainnet 😎.
Building this opened our eyes, it helped us understand the challenges of infrastructure and scale that lie ahead of us. We also realised the experience of trading digital assets in a truly peer to peer manner sucks on desktops via email driven communications, etc. Its akin to building Uber in a world of Desktops and emails.
We kept at the business as we completed $1m in transaction volumes, we looked back and realized:
- The large 10% trades contributed 90% of trade volume.
- Seasoned traders wanted to connect offline as well. Trades happened OTC because of lack of available liquidity.
- Even when the buyers met online, trust was through reputation and not via decentralized smart contract in trader mindset.
- With a small team of 4, we took the lessons from building FindEther. Identified frictions for an amazing experience required for mass scale of P2P Fiat-Crypto trades.
Mobile and Scale
This forced us to go deeper on what all has been developed in the crypto ecosystem with Mobile at the core. It also liberated us to rethink on the possibilities that could be unlocked by being mobile first for consumers on a global scale.
Why not till now?
Technological infrastructure evolves at its own pace, the consumer products that reach masses utilising the existing technologies take further time. As we dived deeper into the issues with UX on product development front. We realised mobile app was not just a good to have feature, but paramount to keep smartphones at the core of product experience if we are to truly connect the global crypto community at all times. Smartphone penetration is not just deeper, but it is only by being closer to the users on their smartphones can Opoch improve the experience of decentralized trades. P2P trades could be compared to marketplaces, where the platform does not hold any inventory from either side of the trade, but connects the individuals.
Bootstrap or Investors
Our desire to solve real problems with great people meant we will have to continue building with what we have, understand with our best knowledge, keep learning fast from our mistakes and understand deeper. We had to keep switching from being focussed to build, then spending time to evaluate and understand where are the real problems and value creation opportunities for long term. This ambiguity ridden story is not something that any investor likes to hear, so we did what we know how do best, bootstrap 🤷 \o/
First Principle
We looked at the paramount aspects for driving mass scale adoption.
- Security: Mainstream users must be able to securely hold their digital assets at all times without being worried about hacks, malicious activities, etc.
- Utility: Users should be able to utilize their cryptocurrencies for applications and activities rather than just as a speculative investment.
We started off with keeping in mind the challenge to build the most secure, open, transparent, multi-currency (Bitcoin/Ethereum/etc.) cross-platform (iOS, Android, Web, etc.) wallet inside Opoch. Something, that is convenient for users with built-in best practices for interacting with decentralized technologies.
Platform, Product, Entry point?
We highlight everything that we have envisioned for Opoch platform including our wallet API, Exchange API, Application platform in our whitepaper.
As an entrepreneur, we kept at the problem with a deeper focus, everybody wants to make the next big platform. But, why as an entrepreneur or a developer would you spend your resources building over someone else’s platform. Reasons must be compelling.
There’s no bigger reason than an available market to serve. So, we are looking to get that in order.
We must get crypto users for Opoch now, for our grand vision later 💪🏻 😎
Awareness vs Adoption
Throughout technological advancements, there have been believers and non-believers in the potential of a technological advancement. Usually, the technology evolves becoming palpable and forcing a gradual change in mainstream perception. Incase of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, interestingly the awareness levels have never been higher, right now over 60% of Americans have heard about Bitcoin, 85% in Canada, 90% in South Korea, 64% in Germany, but it also suffers from a perception of Ponzi, Scam, Terrorist, Money Laundering and God knows what!
So, adoption is far behind! Many aggressive estimates suggest that < 0.5% of people have any cryptocurrencies. This means as an ecosystem, we are looking at a software, technology, product problem for driving mass scale adoption. This, to me feels like removing the barriers to let the flow come. We wish to solve that with Opoch as a product
Challenges of Perception: Building Trust 😇
Betting on building trust through each other, becoming Peer to Peer
We believe a future in which everyone can buy, hold and interact with cryptocurrencies safely, conveniently and regularly without any 3rd party interference will build faith and trust in Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and decentralized ecosystem at large.
🔥 Resource Gathering 🌲
We are in a juncture of Crypto adoption, where this trust would enable further resources that are required to enable mass scale penetration of cryptocurrencies, comparable to the scale of Smartphone and Internet.
Cryptocurrency mainstream adoption would open global markets, industries and opportunities that would define the 21st century. A period of arrival of true information age, Opoch Age.
Marketplace Growth: Opoch Incentives
Marketplaces derive value from their network. Traditionally, this value is locked inside the company stocks and not shared with the users like in case of AirBNB, Uber, Ebay, Facebook, etc. Thankfully, with the emergence of blockchain and the token ecosystem, we can develop incentive mechanisms that allow us to make our early users a part of the organization in a deeper sense.
At Opoch, we have decided to allocate at least 20% of OPOC Tokens to our users supporting our community and business over the coming decades. We have left large parts of our token economics unfinished at the moment, neither do we have any pressure to do at this moment as we do not plan to do any public sale for now. But, we definitely are excited to use OPOC tokens in launching the global crypto adoption competition, ‘The Dawn’ \o/
For now, we promise to make OPOC tokens an integral part of Opoch towards taking cryptocurrencies to everyone!
If any of this sounded exciting, you should definitely read our other blogs to quench your thirst for curiosity. Curiosity is a difficult thing to keep in check, look where it has got us all! 😳let’s not stop here. Let’s arise, awake and stop not till we take cryptocurrencies to 🌏 the World \o/
Further blogs
