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James Greaves is the co-founder of Glyph, an identity service built for the blockchain era.
The following is an exclusive contribution for the 2018 year of CoinDesk under consideration.
I'm completely out of the crypt and I sold my bitcoin and ether all year.
Does it disgust you? Disappoint you?
If you just met me, I guess that would be your first question. (When did it happen you buy?) Unfortunately in crypto, the price at the time of insertion seems to have an impact on what you know about the blockchain.
However, I would start by asking another question. When did the HODL doctrine and sacrilege sell? Where does peer pressure come from?
At the end of 2018, you can proclaim from the roofs of houses that you will do from HODL until the end of time and you will be applauded, revered as a sage – even if you're lying. But if you're going to sell, you have to sneak silently out the back door. You have broken the unwritten rules of the blockchain cult.
My hope is that in 2019 we begin to question the rules on which we are clinging, and this holds us back.
Consistency is the hallmark of the unimagined
When we enter 2019, I believe the crypt needs a strategic execution lesson. Like it or not, there are others like me.
My initial goal was to use cryptography for everything in life, replacing all declinations, a hope that was almost immediately dashed when I entered the market at around $ 3,000 only last year (there is your answer to the previous question). The promised land does not seem to be closer now than it was in January.
As a store of value, I simply do not find cryptocurrency useful – it certainly has not stored much value for me this year. Others probably feel the same way.
Even others (like me) have made the leap as entrepreneurs.
A financial MBA with a track record in venture capital and strategic consulting, I left my job as a manager at a SaaS technology company to start a blockchain venture. All year, I have heard that 2018 is the year in which institutions are involved and "real players" (or at least traditional players) start adopting technology.
Well, some of us have come. What did we find? Hype. Hyperbole. Dogma. A cult that makes little sense. It does not have much value. Few real results.
If I hear another "investor" tell me that I need to pay for them and they will "instruct" me and then introduce me to their Chinese friends, I'm about to lose my mind. Yes, it happened all the time this year.
This year I was told:
- Give me $ 1 million in advance so I can help you earn $ 10 million (no guarantee)
- Give me $ 500,000 in advance so I can introduce you to my wealthy friends (no guarantee)
- Pay me $ 100,000 a month to be a consultant for you – you'll make me a consultant
- Pay me $ 20,000 a month and I'll train you every week. We will make a conference call with my other ICOs (from someone who has never built anything).
We are the industry that is trying to change everything. What we need is constant change until we introduce this technology into the world and maintain the clamor (which is significant).
The blockchain industry is culturally inspired and culturally shattered. There is so much good: it is open, inclusive, revolutionary and authorizing. But it is also illegal, dishonest, mercurial and often explicitly illegal.
ICO, I just knew
That said, it may take a decade to completely unpack everything that happened in 2018.
To get a certain distance and perspective, the price of bitcoin will probably be five times lower than when it started, but three or four times since January 2017.
The problem is that the noisiest and most visible parts of the sector have been too focused on speculation, rapid raising of coins, overturning and making money. This has dragged the rest of the industry to ask wrong questions. We speculated on "utility chips" that did not provide any utility and had teams that had never been successful with anyone before, let alone as a team.
But we must not forget that the ICO have successfully interrupted the VC, even exceeding the VC investments in the initial phase. It is an important milestone for such a young industry.
I believe that the ICO model is still promising, even if in a more mature way and perhaps under different guises. We will have to fight to keep this narrative alive. While the VC model gave us Google, Facebook, Uber and, more or less, everything you've ever heard of, the ICO model provided us with ethereum and CryptoKitties.
Thus, the ICO model has not yet replaced VC as a viable financing methodology. The promise has been demonstrated, but the boom and bust gave his enemies ammunition to fight it.
The Pick-and-Shovel business
The first wave of every revolution must be the noisiest. The visionaries come first. In settling the West, before we had the mappers and fur traders, they wandered wild and brought back stories and exotic things. Some have found gold. This led to the gold rush, the second wave.
But the seekers do not build anything of lasting value. I've been in the gold rush city in the Nevada desert. Once the gold is drawn, people leave. Here are the ghost cities. It is the third wave that colonizes the West, the peasants, the builders. They are the ordinary, boring and quiet people who raise families and settle in a place forever.
Their impact is wide, but their voice is silent because they are not out to party in the saloons and they are not blinking their bags of gold dust.
The good news for us settlers of the third wave is that there is a lot that needs to be built. In my company Glyph we are building KYC and accredited investment tools to help the blockchain community, built thinking of decentralization outside the door. But we need more companies to help new blockchain businesses hire and adapt their management teams, to pay for encrypted personnel, to collaborate as sub-industries and to quickly form strategic partnerships through research and business development.
Culture is the sum of how everyone works and what we are willing to endure. The only way to change it is to take a position collectively.
I am also guilty of creating this culture by doing nothing to stop it. Accepting.
In 2019, I will call him every time I see him. I've done it privately since June. Maybe it's time to start shaking the bad actors publicly. Kick the wolves so the rest of us can build what needs to be built.
At the beginning of 2019, perhaps it is time to reflect on what truths we believe to be self-evident and which should be eradicated from the vulgar. What are we really doing around? Where are we going and, more importantly, how will we get there?
If we are focused on the right things, we can cut the noise.
In 2019 I hope there will be:
- No more white books. Instead, people will evaluate companies on their ability to deliver results
- Other support companies that provide tools and insights on which others can build
- No more blockchain consultants
- No ads between blockchain companies until someone has built something
- Mergers of companies that can not deliver with what they can
- Much of the blockchain conferences that cease activity
- More compliance, custody and technical tools that support greater transparency and adoption
- Security tokens that satisfy their hype and at the same time avoid all the pitfalls of the Ico
- Differentiation in public opinion between currencies and speculation.
They are still the first days. There is much more coming. It happens so much that it is so positive.
Do you have a strong vision of 2018? News via e-mail [at] coindesk.com to send an opinion to our year in review.
Theatrical masks via Shutterstock
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