Cryptoassets and the windy road of adoption
The hype about blockchain and cryptocurrencies cooled down a bit (at least for the time being), but the business and tech world is unanimous: blockchain is here, and it is going to stay and evolve. How and with what pace is in the hands of everyone who participates in the development of the infrastructure and creates new ways of usage. By some estimations, there are about 20 million crypto users worldwide which are 0,25% of the world’s population. Considering this fact, we cannot be surprised that there is still a lot of misconceptions about blockchain, cryptocurrencies and decentralized apps (dApps).
First, we need to differentiate cryptocurrencies from other decentralized apps that are running on the blockchain. Major cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple) are the most known applications and are mainly used for trading and transferring value as opposed to other projects running on (and using) their tokens. There are more than 2000 tokens on the market as we speak. It does seem like a lot but let’s compare the market size with another disruptor from the past — the internet. If we take the total number of users of cryptocurrencies, tokens, and existing dApps and compare it with the same figures on the adoption of the internet, we are now in the year 1994 of the internet evolution era.
At the same time, many believe that the adoption of blockchain will take longer compared to the Internet adoption because the blockchain is much more complicated and it deals not only with the infrastructure development but also with digital money. Nevertheless, we are heading towards decentralization of particular services and the primary point being positive effects for the end users. To get there, we need to overcome some critical milestones: increased performance, interoperability, reduced costs and complexity, supportive regulation and more collaboration.
New companies and contributing parties are making constant progress towards increased performance, better interoperability and collaboration on multiple levels, and continuously exploring viable use cases — the main responsibility of everyone in the ecosystem is to promote the development of applications and educate the society to foster adoption. Adoption and development go hand in hand.
VouchForMe is one of the projects building on the idea of decentralization by applying the blockchain technology to the array of social proof. By harnessing the power of social connections among friends VouchForMe helps reduce the costs of different services demanding some form of risk assessment. Social proof as designed by VouchForMe has several possibilities of application, the most viable one being in the insurance space. The ground-breaking idea is to tokenize the social proof, which led to the introduction of the VouchForMe’s IPL token.
IPL token is a utility token* and will as such be the fuel of VouchForMe platform used by clients and third-party business partners worldwide for obtaining and using services on VouchForMe platform. Tokenization of property will allow VouchForMe to uniquely identify insurance assets and transform the information to other types of businesses via a digital record, containing information about one’s social proof.
The first step to put IPL token in motion is a working product that enables business transactions and rewarding system in IPL token. The second is to promote the social proof concept and to create opportunities and unique offering. VouchForMe platform will use different means to incentivize participants to use it and tokens will be listed on various exchanges to simplify the trading process and make the token available to a broad audience.
In the long term, we envision creating a whole ecosystem around VFM platform. On the one hand, we believe that other segments of the fiat economy, closely linked to the insurance industry, will consequently start accepting IPL tokens as a currency, serving as an additional boost of an IPL utility token economy. On the other hand, we see VFM platform being a central engine used by developers to build new features on top, expanding its use and get paid for the expansion of the platform in tokens.
How fast the evolution of IPL token will be, is closely linked to the general adoption of cryptocurrencies and the development of the regulatory environment. The more adoption there will be, more easily will the tokens be used. Cryptocurrencies are at their beginnings, but already at the stage when they are impossible to ignore.
