Among the start-ups, the fashion for attracting investments was replaced by an alternative way - through the sale of tokens for crypto currency. This is the so-called ICO (Initial Coin Offering). Such a tool is often adopted by technological start-ups, which are subsequently going to use Blockchain as their base technology for their future ideas. They are not alien to everything regarding the crypt. They pretend to be new players in crypto-economics.
Such generalizations as cryptoeconomics or ICO look beautiful, but many have quite predictable fears that crypto startups are a soap bubble. A start-up - just playing on the popularity of new trends, business people. And these theses, if desired, you can find many confirmations. At least because the rate of crypto currency is still very unstable. And it's not always clear on the outcome of the banding campaigns, what is the value of those collected funds. And the value of the very ideas of new young entrepreneurs sometimes seems highly overrated.
But I'll try to show the other side of the coin and analyze what the problem can be solved by crypto startups. And why it can hardly be solved using the tools of the traditional economy.
When there are no friends, no reputation Let's start by looking for similarities. With the naked eye, it can be found that start-ups that claim to the global level and have recently launched the ICO want to solve problems from one order. Their goal - to play on the hidden potential of a particular market, the value of which has so far been impossible to extract traditional methods. For example, the startup Propy, with the help of smart contracts, is going to solve the problem of easy and quick sale of land, real estate and, possibly, in the future, other property to foreign investors. This is exactly the area where there have been many barriers. First of all, due to the absence of a chain of links between real estate sellers from one country and buyers from another. It's good, if the buyer has a competent agent or just friends abroad who will help to find the right connections with the owners and establish a trusting relationship. But if this is not the case, potential investors simply will not know what investment opportunities they have abroad, do not trust strangers.
In the example, Propy leads the relationship of sellers and buyers of China and the United States. Now, Chinese citizens are one of the largest groups of foreign investors in US real estate (owning US real estate worth more than $ 28 billion). But the volume of the general local market of the States is tens of times greater - over $ 29 trillion. At the same time, not all the Chinese who have become rich recently know the mechanisms how to choose and buy something in America. Although they probably would like to.
Blockchain in this case can replace the missing link. In a decentralized registry, anyone can track transactions of interest to him. Such transparent transactions on the one hand will form the reputation of the seller, agent, and on the other investor. Here almost everything is like in Uber, where the passenger sees the driver's rating, and the driver - whom he will have to fail. The only difference is that Uber makes central rules centrally, and in transactions based on decentralized registries all its participants.
Virtual exchange approximately the same undisclosed until this day niche market wants to take another future marketpleys the sale of virtual goods. He completed yesterday the ICO and collected $ 11.5 million (in terms of the rate of crypto) in four days. In the world there are thousands of video games in which players receive or spend a lot of money to pump their characters, purchase virtual attributes. But a single marketplace for all these virtual worlds until recently did not exist. This did not allow more than 2 billion players to sell their virtual values. Only the most advanced well-known gamers profitably trade their skins on separate sites. Others trust them, so in their gaming worlds they already have a certain reputation. The player who has not yet been in his virtual world, is unlikely to find a one-time buyer for a virtual product, which he no longer needs. For the simple reason that he will not even know how to do it. And here the decentralized mechanism of Blockchain can again play its role and form new values, a new market.
On such bricks and can be built in the foreseeable future cryptoeconomics. It will gradually fill those niches where transactions for some reason were impossible. And the value of goods or services was limited. At its core, what they are trying to build new startups is very similar to service ecosystems that have already formed services for renting AirBnB housing or for private transportation of Uber. The only difference is that the designer from which the ecosystem is going to collect will no longer have a centralized collector.
The rules of the game will be formed by the participants of this game. This should theoretically open up new opportunities in the field of logistics and cross-border transportation, cross-border transactions and investments. In other words, the world is one step away from becoming more globalized. And only the launch of such start-ups as Propy or Dmarket in 2018 will show us whether this next step is possible at all. And the risk that the bubble will simply swell around the new trend is very great.