Business Of DLT: What’s The Competition?
By TheNews.asia on Altcoin Academy
In the years that TheNews.Asia has been operating, contributors have had dozens and dozens of interviews with blockchain company C-level operators who are eager to share the information they have about their company. Many of them answer questions with the blissful glee of someone unaware that what they’re saying may actually hurt their interests and/or their bottom line. Another common trope among the clearly underprepared is that they have no competition. The irony lies in the boldness of their statement while being quite literally surrounded by dozens of other blockchain companies vying for the very same market share as for them.
Two years ago, a blockchain company was heavily touted as the one to watch in South Korea because they earned the backing of one of the largest crypto funds also based in South Korea. When asked very frankly how they planned to make profits, the respondent, who happened to be the CBDO, replied that he hadn’t thought about it. He concluded that maybe the company could charge people for using their product. A novel idea. More recently, TheNews.Asia fielded an interview with another blockchain company CEO. This company, however, had been in business for less than a year. The CEO said,
“I don’t feel that anyone in the space is competitive. We’re all iterating as an industry.”
Competition is inherent in an industry that operates in a free market. The blockchain industry operates in the free global market. The extended bull of 2018 and early 2019 shed away much of the fat, especially in more immature local markets, but their exit just left the door wide open for larger firms to come in and fill the space. These larger firms realize that there is fierce competition for the currently limited market share. Take Hedera Hashgraph for example. Hedera is a company made up of successful business owners, top developers in their field, and a growing council of high net-worth companies eager to be a part. They patented their product to the chagrin of the blockchain purists largely as an effort to protect the product they have spent so much time, effort, and fiscal resources to create. They are protecting their greatest asset and ensuring a profitable future.
Say what you will about the product itself. The point is rather on the business end that Hedera Hashgraph is likely a company that will remain solvent for the long-term because of their sound business decisions. They accept not just the challenge of competition, albeit mostly positive competition, but also the mere existence of it in the blockchain industry and are hedging their loose ends with the savvy of experienced businesses.
Bitcoin is another example. Bitcoin isn’t a company at all, and the Bitcoin Foundation was created only to protect the image of Bitcoin as a top cryptocurrency. It is a distributed technology being developed simultaneously by countless independent developers who earn no profit from the success or failure of the cryptocurrency itself because there are no business interests at stake. Bitcoin is currently, and has always been the top cryptocurrency by trade volume. There is no hint that that will change any time soon. No company has even come close to matching Bitcoin’s performance or even its potential.
It is disconcerting to see so many blockchain companies that have viable ideas for truly practical solutions to real-world problems be used as grist for the business evolution of the industry so easily. Major corporations have found the baby golden goose and will raise it to be their own.
