This isn’t investment advice but our opinion about the ICO markets in general. Please don’t take it too seriously. If you could consider it gossip that might be better.
We have a new video series we are doing, Crypto News by White Rabbit where we discussed the difference of dApps vs Protocols in the ICO landscape. Check it out here:
Investors aren’t really looking to invest in dApps these days, at least not as much as they were before. Most investors want to invest in protocols.
Early 2017 saw some pretty bad scaling issues with Ethereum, and all these people came out of the woodwork claiming to be the new messiah of scalability.
Ben calls it scalability springtime.
Hashgraph, Metahash, Satori, Cardano, etc, etc. These are all flowers in the springtime of scalability.
Which ones will flourish, and which one will wilt?
EOS is a response to some of these scaling issues, along with the issues of zero transaction fees.
You read that right, zero transaction fees.
TPS
We can also refer to this period as The Battle of Transaction Speeds.
Check out this article on TPS with top 9 coins.
Notable and kinda stupid: It’s been 10 years and Bitcoin TPS is still slow af, no wonder people are migrating off of it. I used to be hodl on Bitcoin, total maximalist, but now, I’m like
Horses and Cars
Horses were hella fast at one time.
Also the horse and carriage, the horse and buggy were kinda fast. You could go pretty fast on those dirt roads back in the day, but maybe your wheel would break and you’d get beat up by an Indian or bit by a rattlesnake and die, but it was still not bad! People didn't know any better.
When the first cars came out, they didn’t really go that far and pretty expensive, although if they had a road they would go pretty fast. It took A LONG TIME for the roads to be built to even make the car plausible. Mostly rich dudes racing or riding them around like toys in their rich guy neighborhoods at first.
Right now, VISA is like the horse in the first days of the car, it's fast on the dirt road. Crypto is the car in that old day story, no roads in sight, yet.
Today it still makes a lot of sense to buy your groceries on VISA, just like you should hop on a horse to buy your groceries during the first days of cars. It just made sense.
But… as time went on, there were more roads. Horses smell and require a ton of upkeep and they take dumps everywhere. In the end the car is faster, it doesn’t bounce around, and you can drive it any time. Also you can carry hella groceries in a car! You can also take all your friends out.
Wow cars are fucking cool!
Don’t Underestimate dApps
dApps don’t exactly need to be blockchain specific. They can be built on any blockchain, and be
If we think of protocols like protocols on the internet, or even internet infrastructure, sure this could be a very profitable investment.
dApps are of a different breed though. You can think of a dApp like Facebook or even some other shitty app that you never heard of that failed. That’s what a dApp really is. Most people shouldn’t see much difference between an app and a dApp.
If somebody is building a dApp that ends up being a Facebook, this could be an investment of a lifetime. This could also be a sweet investment in a utility token that’s used in a dApp. Just imagine if FB rolled out their token, now investors have an extra way to invest in FB and make more money.
EVERYBODY KINDA LIKES MONEY, and now there are even more ways to get it.
Protocols - Open Vs Closed
Protocols did well in 2017.
There may not be enough room in the space for all of them to succeed. Seems obvious, they can’t all win, but maybe more of them will win than we can imagine. Maybe they will all win for a while. Maybe they will all fail.
Maybe there will be one ring to rule them all.
Take EOS. EOS has billions, how is anybody going to compete?
Developers use many different software development platforms, they have different roles, and they coexist and succeed at the same time. Protocols could follow this.
Some protocols are proprietary and some are open sources. People in the community and in the market.
On one hand, Ripple is keeping banks busy with crypto, on the other hand, Ripple could be seen as taking away some steam from the open source innovation, or not honoring the overall mission of crypto while still capitalizing off of it.
Ripple is for old dudes. Stellar is for less old dudes. Stellar is Ripple’s cooler younger cousin.
Stellar Mooning
Stellar hasn’t really mooned but a lot of people think it is. It is making it’s way on a lot of exchanges and it’s per coin price looks cheaper than everything else. Also it’s market cap still gives it room to grow. Plus it has a sweet logo.
Stellar was really ahead of the curve in it’s use case, API and branding. They were really the first really well thought out token ecosystem. They have a lot of competition though now.
Stellar is like Ripple’s cooler younger cousin, like the hipster version of Ripple. A lot of people would probably think I’m dumb for saying that.
EOS Coming Out
Super excited.
How much will it cost to run an app on EOS? We were wondering about that today. We don’t know.
We will likely explore that again in another article.
