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No More Hype: Time To Separate Crypto From Blockchain Technology (forbes.com)
Many people argue that cryptocurrencies are the revolution, not to mention, the technology. How can you blame them? They have only started hearing about Blockchain and crypto during the bitcoin boom last year.I say, it's time we know how to separate the technology from its application.

Blockchain technology has the potential to cause a massive paradigm shift, that decentralizes systems and process for business, organizations, economies and governments. Blockchain technology simply engenders trust in inherently “trustless” interactions and negates the need to have a centralized intermediary to attest to events.

Cryptocurrency for instance is an application of Blockchain technology that functions as peer-to-peer money without the input of banks as a central recording or settlement intermediary.

"Compared to the internet, we're still very early. The internet was around for a while before the dotcom boom at the end of the nineties," tells me Ian Balina, a Blockchain influencer. "There is a lot of volatility in the space, due to growth and speculation.

Naturally, prices rise tremendously and fall tremendously. Each time this happens, the industry becomes more mature, with the current adopters filtering out the signal from the noise.”Unfortunately, Blockchain is still miles away from attracting the critical mass necessary to unlock its mass-market adoption.

The results of a survey conducted by UK-based bank HSBC, last year revealed that 59% of customers polled have not heard about Blockchain and 80% of those who’ve heard about it don’t really understand what it is.

Many people erroneously confuse Blockchain with Bitcoin and the earliest associations of Bitcoin with Silk Road is making many people averse to cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin came into limelight for its use on Silk Road as payment for illegal and borderline criminal activities because of the anonymity that it ensured in settling transactions.

The subsequent media sensations of Silk Road and Bitcoin, and the eventual take down of the site and its operators succeeded in ensuring that many traditional financial institutions, businesses, and individuals would not entertain the idea Bitcoin as a means of payment.

It is practically impossible to discuss Blockchain technology without a mention of its associations with cryptocurrency; hence, the first mention of Blockchain often evokes memories of Bitcoin and Silk Road.

Nonetheless, Blockchain technology is fundamentally different from cryptocurrency. In fact, cryptocurrency is only of the many possible applications of Blockchain.

Some fans believe Blockchain could change the world, but most of the ideas on the disruptive nature of this technology are still in landing pages, white papers and tech papers.

For this most part, the truly disruptive applications of Blockchain technology beyond cryptocurrencies are still in ideation stage and it might take a couple of years before they even hit the market as MVPs.

Interestingly, many of the enterprise clients that are experimenting with the technology are only using it to store their company data as they gradually reduce dependence on centralized data bases.

Of course, some high-tech startups are already looking ways to use Blockchain to leverage existing technology. Nonetheless, the fundamental challenge is the chicken and egg paradox. Some companies won’t invest in seeing decentralized applications until there’s a mass-market adoption of the technology; unfortunately, there can’t be mass-adoption until there are market ready applications.

“Blockchain is rapidly moving from the fat protocols stage, where all value is generated in the protocol layer, into the fat applications (DApps) stage, " says Erez Ben Kiki, founder of 2Key Network, "The foundations that have been built are strong enough to host applications, that will attract users that not necessarily interested in the financial side of it, but by the real usage.

The cryptocurrency market suffers huge volatility that is exponentially bigger than the kinds of volatility recorded in other assets such as stock and forex.  In the year-to-date period, the market cap of the entire cryptocurrency market has declined by 56% in contrast to massive gains in the same period last year.


The SIFR Volatility Index for cryptocurrency is currently around 54.6 and it has been as high as 148.11 this year. For context, annualized historical, long-term average of realized volatility of the S&P 500 index is roughly 15%/year.

The volatility in the cryptocurrency space and the collations between cryptocurrency and Blockchain, makes Blockchain, as a technology to be perceived as fragile and unstable.

Unfortunately, the criticism and outright antagonism that cryptocurrency faces from traditional financial establishments invariably rubs off on Blockchain technology.

Many traditional financial institutions believe that cryptocurrency is too volatile to be a reliable form of money – by implication, many people assume that Blockchain technology is inherently unstable or unreliable.

Hence, other applications of Blockchain such as tokenization, Smart Contracts and automated governance are being overshadowed by the negativity surrounding cryptocurrencies.
Interestingly, the Blockchain high-tech industry has seen some growth towards maturity in the past year.

Gradually, it seems that entrepreneurs are coming to understand the need for such a technology and they are not afraid to dive into these uncharted waters.Ivan Liljeqvist, a well-known Blockchain influencer and the face of the ‘Ivan On Tech’ YouTube channel is optimistic:

“Blockchain is an industry full of opportunities, we are open-sourcing finance and transforming the way Internet works by decentralizing digital money, computing and data."
 

Yoav Vilner is a world recognized startup mentor, industry leader and entrepreneur.
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    Francisco Gimeno - BC Analyst Blockchain is coming into the headlines more and more. As with the beginning of internet, more and more people start realising its importance and working on all its opportunities. We must iterate and iterate, as blockchain believers, the idea of blockchain as a powerful, disruptive for good tool, to be used as we need it or even as we discover in new ways we can use it.