Blockchain Bubble? No. Blockchain Babble? Yes.

What is all the babble about?

Peter B Smith
Upstate Interactive
3 min readAug 1, 2018

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What Is in a Word?

Outside of the tech space, many people aren’t familiar with the word blockchain. They may have heard of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, but blockchain itself tends to mystify the masses.

If you spend time online, however, you’ve likely heard of both bitcoin and blockchain. Asking, “What is the underlying programming language to interact with the Ethereum blockchain?” often leads to blank stares, however. So does asking, “Where does a web developer learn to interact with the blockchain?”

You May Not Know

You are an Internet person, so you are not ignorant to blockchain. You may not know that Solidity is the programming language of choice for Ethereum, and you may not be aware that grabbing transactions from a blockchain ledger is possible with a web API, and you may not be aware that linking the web and blockchains is possible today, reliably.

Let Us Babble

We held an event to babble about the not-a-bubble. We did not discuss any cryptocurrency market prices and the hard forks that are messing with the bank accounts of teenage and retirement-age investors. We discussed the technical.

Doug Crescenzi, our in-house blockchain security engineer, shared the latest stories he has from contributing to OpenZeppelin.

Aaron Anderson, our friend at web3devs, went in-depth on how he and his shop builds web-enabled Ethereum interfaces by way of an overview of using Web3 with React.js.

CryptoKitties took over the world of Ethereum. KittyHats made those pussycats kings and queens by giving them hats. Dan Viau of Salina Labs talked about what it took him and his team to make KittyHats a reality.

Mo Morsi of Dev Null Productions dove into the world of Ripple and XRP with a high-level understanding of the often misunderstood technology.

Babbling on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on…

Blockchain conversations are becoming blockchain businesses. There are now consultancies, like Upstate Interactive and Web3Devs, focusing on blockchain solutions for businesses. We are finding a lot of great conversation from the past turning in our most exciting projects. In fact, you can expect the blockchain people you know to continue babbling on about it.

Fundamental technologies are enabled by hard research. Then those technologies are commercialized. Finally, they are consumerized.

We are seeing applications now at the commercial level and there are more coming through our door every day.

You can can call it a bubble and miss the wave or join the conversation and start building.

We are happy to host another event focused on blockchain. Until then, you can find us at The Future of Blockchains in Toronto, Canada, on August 15 and 16.

Babble on!

☞ To stay up to date with our work with smart contract development, follow us on Medium and Twitter.

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