Remember the video of that crazy guy screaming about BitConnect at a conference in Thailand? It may seem like a lifetime ago but that short clip, which epitomises everything that was wrongheaded in the cryptocurrency craze which swept the globe at the end of 2017, is barely a year old.
Fast forward to today and Bitcoin has just had a huge slump in value, interest in cryptocurrency is down and many now see the industry as a minefield of scammers and ponzi schemes.
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Wow! Absurd! TRON’s “paper” is mostly copied from other projects, or is super basic p2p passed off as original. Zero references.
Archived that PDF in IPFS, in case they take it down: https://t.co/jv7EuSYenL pic.twitter.com/GbiL7MUrnc
— Juan Benet (@juanbenet) January 7, 2018
A key component of these crappy companies’ plans was providing a ‘whitepaper’ detailing what they would do with any of the money they raised. Many of these papers were total rubbish and some, when run by the real scam artists, were just copied and pasted from other startups.
More products, fewer papers
“That’s something I see changing in the industry,” said Aviv Lichtigstein, founder of blockchain education company 101 Blockchains. “We’re going to see more companies building technology before publishing a whitepaper. There need to be more working products and fewer papers.”
Isaac’s Vegan Nation is one company that has done just that. Though the company, which hopes to create a cryptocurrency for vegans across the world, has been around for over a year, it is yet to launch its ICO.
“We could have done it back in February and probably raised a $100 million,” said Isaac, “but if the coin lost 90 percent of its value then, in the long run, we would lose the trust of our community. So, instead of that, we built all the infrastructure and products – things most companies are talking about doing two or three years after the ICO – in order to launch with a token that is backed by everyone in the vegan community.”
Consolidation
All of the above may give you the impression that cryptocurrency executives are turning into cynics. That isn’t the case. After all, everyone who was at Krypton’s event is still working in cryptocurrency or blockchain.
Instead, people seem to believe that the market is maturing. As noted already, the get-rich-quick traders and fraudsters are filtering out and leaving behind serious companies and genuine entrepreneurs.
“We’re going to see a lot of coins delisting,” said Sandris. “A lot of exchanges and projects will be going bankrupt too but we’ll see more mergers and acquisitions like the Bithumb or Poloniex buys that we saw this year. I think there will also be more segmentation in the cryptocurrency market. Security tokens and utility tokens are two very different things but we are yet to see that in the market itself.”
Back at the beginning of October, we here at Finance Magnates said that a decline in interest would, paradoxically, be good for the cryptocurrency industry. That view seems to be popular not just amongst us hacks but the people working in the industry itself.
True, a more mature, subdued industry is less exciting than someone running around on a stage in South-East Asia screaming about impossible returns, but it is a sign that we can start taking the blockchain industry more seriously. Isn’t that what the cryptocurrency fanboys have always wanted?