Blockchain utilitarianism: solutions that people can use

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The adoption of mainstream blockchain is at the mouths of many experts and analysts due to the proliferation of token investment.

For example, one in five undergraduate students in the United States has been reported to hold Bitcoin or another currency as of August 2018; while simultaneously there was an incremental convergence between government and large industry with blockchain.

These are unions between traditional power holders and innovators in a new sector: with requests for business satisfaction through extensive funding and institutional support.

While these relationships present a potentially positive future for each of the parties, they do not speak of the utilitarian value that the crypt can offer to the average person – rather than its value as a currency.

For this reason, we have decided to present four of our new favorite projects that try to offer solutions that have value derived from real people who can do with them, rather than other machines or protocols.

# 1. Blockfolio

Cryptocurrency portfolio management solutions are a competitive industry. In addition to the "top 10" clickbait lists, even a search for community resources such as Reddit translates into a wide assortment of threads with people asking "what is the best portfolio management software?"

Blockfolio (founded in 2014) is one of the best known offers in space and has accumulated several million users. The company made headlines in mid-October due to a $ 11.5 million increase in Series A funding led by the famed Pantera Capital cryptocurrency fund.

Key features include support for monitoring over 6,000 cryptocurrencies, over 300 exchanges and more portfolio functionality. Another feature that helped the project stand out is "Blockfolio Signal", a function that allows cryptographic teams to transmit update messages to their communities.

Among the more than 100 actively engaged teams using the Signal beta platform, important teams have been included so far: Ethereum Classic, Augur, 0x, Monero and Dash.

# 2. BitMart

BitMart is a cryptocurrency exchange that this author has been following for some time. They made the courageous attempt to implement a community token polling investment system, and one that has otherwise received terrible controversy due to failed attempts by rivals – along with a lack of community evidence to fully verify their integrity .

According to CoinMarketCap, Bitmart ranks 15th in the list of the "100 best cryptocurrencies traded by (correct) trade volume".

Since the last time I wrote about the company, the answer to "Mission X" has been largely positive: the team has established valuable partnerships with a wide range of tokens.

Although the consensus (as with many blockchain projects at the time) has not yet been fully confirmed, BitMart has pushed forward, with frequent detailed statistical reports published weekly. Two of the latest versions are complete apps for iOS and Android, with highly accessible user interfaces and support services.

These mobile applications incorporate many of the key features of their larger desktop cousin, with the added functionality of push notifications and instant updates for the market and the chosen coin. Another interesting aspect of BitMart is their & # 39; Investment Lab & # 39 ;, a fundraising center for the new tokens ERC-20, NEP-5 and Stellar Smart Contract.

& # 39; Investment Lab & # 39; it is intrinsically linked to the BMX market, which is an OTC exchange where investors can buy and trade different fiat and crypto-assets. In fact, the site boasts 53 trading pairs at the moment, with all new listings fully verified by an internal currency review team

# 3. Ares Tech

From arcade machines to home consoles and smartphone apps: video games have had a long and legendary history with digital currencies.

It began as the exchange of small change in exchange for "credits" that could be exchanged for a game round and has since become ubiquitous in all forms of interactive entertainment. More recent examples include "points", and these are used to buy from a library intellectual property and services. See Xbox Live, business models – Free-to-play & # 39; and digital games that can be purchased.

The problem is that the market-leading services platforms that facilitate these purchases are centralized (Steam, Xbox, etc.). And the currency is not complete in most cases to comply with various regulations. The only exception is the game of chance.

Another symptom of a select handful of platform owners is a monopolization of hardware and software distribution and licensing rights, resulting in astronomical costs and barriers to entry for independent creators.

Ares Tech claims to have identified and created a solution for the disparate nature of the development of "social game" in particular, producing a unified set of tools. The use and adoption of this framework (if in agreement with the plan) will allow interoperability between different software titles. For example, user data and profile resources could be used to access multiple games by protecting participant data through blockchain storage and encryption.

It will be open source and all games will be published on GitHub. Ares promises to allow navigation and asset and currency management in a single unified interface and includes the BTC and ETH protocols: ERC20, ERC233, ERC721 and ERC998.

# 4. MenloOne

MenloOne is an open source framework that aims to simplify the development process for decentralized applications (DApp) and solve pre-existing constraints that favor a poor user experience, performance and security.

Their latest novelty is the release of their first DApp to be built using their framework, entitled "Block Overflow". It acts as a case of use and a potential forerunner of their MVP, which is "Stack Overflow", a well-known Q / A site aimed at the software development community.

The proposed hook is that the troubleshooting process will be accelerated by offering user queries as rewards with time-sensitive rewards. Block Overflow also uses the communication level & # 39; Townhall & # 39; which was created to give token-based user rewards (as per the team's technical roadmap).

With a strong team and a white paper, the team has a strong possibility is a strong chance that the team is ready for success in achieving its ambitious and disruptive goals.

Founder and CEO Matt Nolan is also known for his position as a speaker and resident at TED and has previously worked in blue-chip companies such as JP Morgan and IBM; while operating director David Dawson is a veteran engineer at Microsoft, where he worked on cutting-edge projects such as Windows, Xbox and Office.

This project was brought to the attention of these writers when it was included in articles such as a recent Forbes list that included the "Top 10 of the new blockchain companies to keep an eye on in 2018" – together with players the likes of Gameflip.

# 5. Unification

The Unification of Singapore is one of these projects and hopes to bring the torch of a "sovereign identity" based on blockchain. This is a concept that numerous "ICOs" have tried and failed, mainly because their predecessors have tried to sensitize consumers directly or "DApps" to build inside their walled garden of property.

Unification is doing it a little differently, focusing on the decentralized UVCID identity protocol and instead of asking companies to build from scratch – they are integrating with existing businesses through a structured awareness program at app and businesses not blockchain.

There is a diametric opposition to the status quo – where users send their information to separate platforms (from market leaders like Facebook and Twitter, to small businesses and e-commerce merchants like Amazon). Furthermore, storing this information has been proven to be less secure in many examples, with an opaque representation of customer statistics and absolute anonymity.

For example, it would be more likely to see the Unification team at CES or the Mobile World Congress inform the non-employees that they would always meet with the same people in the same cryptic conference. This business model from the outward appearance is refreshing and indicative of the fact that our industry evolves beyond the initial speculative bubble to building toolkits for practical applications.

At the beginning of this year, Unification debuted the prototype demo of its flagship product: an interface called "BABEL" is intended for companies and uses a C ++ intelligent contract protocol to standardize the interoperable data in a single and unified format that can be used on any participating platform. It also allows for the integration of existing mainstream applications and decentralized apps (DApp).

Featured image courtesy of Shutterstock.

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