Keeping up with Blockchain Adoption.

Disclosures

The Author and the Servamps Organisation may hold a position in one or more of the included tokens, but were not paid to produce this write up, and take no responsibility for reader speculation on asset price.

The past few weeks has been a whirlwind full of partnerships and announcements most people simply do not have time to keep up with, with the most significant coming out of the Barcelona World Mobile Congress I was lucky enough to be at, so I’ve curated a few of the most notable and dug a little deeper into the scale of these announcements.

Enjin (https://enjincoin.io/) ($ENJ) most notably announced that the Samsung S10 mobile phone will come with a compatible wallet, sending the token up 200% in price. Samsung sold over 70 million units in 2018, making this one of the most notable scenes for blockchain adoption and integration in history.

They didn’t stop there though — on the 6th March Enjin announced a partnership with Unity. Unity is a game development platform, not just any platform, the platform that is used to create over half of the worlds games. Enjin are releasing the testnet version of the SDK, which will soon be available to Unity developers on the asset store.

Why is this a attractive or exciting to game developers and players?

Blockchain empowers the gaming world, and can offer the below benefits, and many more:

• Real ingame currencies, creating next gen in game economies
• Ingame assets backed by crypto assets
• True ownership of digital assets, like skins, or rare weapons.
• Collectible, non fungible rewards to top players.
• Preventing fraud such as fake items
• Lower transaction costs
• Incentivization for game developers to be rewarded more fairly
• Less profits to middle men — more to creators

The Enjincoin CTO Witek Radomski, invented the ERC1155 standard — known as the “multi token standard” — which takes all the features of ERC20 and ERC721 and combines them. This allows significantly lower cost of issuing and transferring non-fungible (unique) tokens.

On the topic of phones — HTC also announced a partnership with Ethereum-powered, decentralized virtual reality “Decentraland”, and support for their native token (and in game currency): MANA.

This is particularly interesting as HTC have been building the world’s ‘first’ blockchain powered phone: EXODUS 1, and Decentraland will debut their very own marketplace on this mobile phone. The downside to this, is HTC is having a considerably harder time to sell units and has reported significant losses in 2017 and 2018, leading me to think that maybe the blockchain enabled phone is a clutch of desperation from a dying company, who have seen a trend and want to capitalise on it?

It wouldn’t be unfair to say the same for Samsung, either, who reported a drop in sales last year.

Despite this, the partnership gives us hope that intelligent, front end, user focused solutions are being built for this complex technology. This is afterall the most important thing; real people using blockchain without knowing, but seeing the benefits.

After some digression we can move away from looking at these phone companies to instead look closer at Decentraland as a singular entity, that has been extremely successful in the past 12 months despite market conditions. DGC (Digital Currency Group) notably created a Decentraland focused VC back in December, which means that big bets are on the virtual reality worlds success — and it’s no surprise they see big success here, with one piece of land selling for $200,000 in an auction last November. This crossover of blockchain and VR is right in the futuristic sweet spot, that’s for sure.

Moving our attention the Basic Attention Token ($BAT) which ironically, people have not paid much attention to at all, as it quietly reached 20 million downloads on Android in March.

Brave is a blockchain powered browser that completely cuts adds — and instead pays the user tokens if they choose to view them. It’s token economic model simple yet effective, it’s been somewhat a sleeper in terms of token price and activity for some time, other than last years Coinbase listing.

Aside from reaching 20 million downloads, Brave also recently partnered with Tap Network. Tap Network are an advertising and data platform, with access to over 250,000 brands, including some of the biggest brands on the planet like Amazon and Starbucks, and Hilton Hotels.

BAT will now be spendable at up to 250,000 brands worldwide.

How does this work?

• TAP Network have a curated list of over 250,000 partner brands.
• Brave users have to “opt in” in to view adverts.
• TAP Network uses unique, permissioned data to target consumers with relevant adverts.
• Brave users can use their tokens to access these deals directly and spend.

Simple, but effective, and definitely something people do not understand the real impact of, as they haven’t heard of Tap Network!

A partnership with a brand like this is much bigger than a partnership with one of their single clients, this allows access to a significant portfolio for all Brave users and BAT holders alike.

These are some of the most grand announcements we have ever seen in the space, and I’m confident that partnerships of this scale will continue to roll out over 2019; with more of a focus on building systems for the end user experience, adoption of smart, and emerging technology becomes almost seamless.

Who do you think is next to announce a big partnership?

About the Author

Charles Read is a Blockchain project researcher, advisor and the founder of Servamps, a project accelerator & consultancy focused on user acquisiton. We help to build narratives around smart, future-thinking businesses to bring attention in from a global audience.

Follow Charles and Servamps on Twitter.

For information or investment, contact us at info@servamps.com