Builders continue to focus on key aspects of blockchain infrastructure in order to remove bottlenecks for mass adoption, volume transactions and ease of use. By leveraging decentralization to challenge legacy systems that are prone to manipulation, these new blockchain-based platforms hold the promise of driving efficiencies and transforming industries — from e-commerce to the sharing economy to data storage to finance — making transactions and business agreements resilient against manipulation as well as high fees charged by middlemen.
In today’s newsletter from blockchain investment firm Pantera, CEO Dan Morehead highlights four upcoming blockchain projects designed to tackle scalability and interoperability and spark the decentralized marketplace sector.
Says Morehead,
“We have been supporting them since their earliest stages of development and are excited to see working products ship. Not only will this bring more liquidity to our ICO funds, but also bring additional robustness to blockchain infrastructure.”
The projects are Polkadot, BloXroute, Origin and Filecoin.
“The technology is aiming to bridge disparate blockchains through a system of relay chains and parachains… As the market is signaling a multi-blockchain ecosystem, it will be important for cross-chain communication protocols to connect them.”
“The project is described as a “layer 0” solution as it focusses on the underlying network layer – the biggest bottleneck in scaling. For context, when you send a transaction on ethereum or bitcoin, you have to broadcast that transaction to a group of computers who then relays it to another group of computers. It’s like a game of telephone except it takes a really long time because each person has to call ten of their friends who then call another ten.
After ten hops, all of a sudden it’s taken a long time to complete one phone call. The idea with bloXroute is, instead of having to call ten sequences of people to route your phone call, why not just do one direct call.”
“A protocol for creating decentralized marketplaces on ethereum. The idea is to connect buyers and sellers directly, effectively removing the rent-seeking entities that charge 20-30% for each transaction on their platforms. The total addressable market within the sharing economy model is massive and so are the fees extracted by the middlemen in control: Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, etc. In theory, removing these entities out of the equation would effectively allow for significant cost reductions for both the buying and selling sides.
“A decentralized marketplace for file storage. The amount of storage capacity sitting idle around the world is greatly underutilized. Through Filecoin, individuals can monetize their unused hardware by participating in the network as a Filecoin miner and fulfilling storage requests by clients.”
While Morehead says he expects the long-awaited projects to launch later this year or early next, he cautions investors to exercise patience as developers build out robust infrastructure.
“These applications and technologies aren’t developed overnight. Months-to-years of development and beta testing take place before projects can be deployed. An unfortunate byproduct of raising capital through an ICO or public token offering is an accelerated expectation of when final products are shipped.
The reality is that investing in these projects is like early-stage venture but with a real-time price feed. These technologies will take a while to build and they will be iterated upon many times before they work. So we encourage investors to keep that in mind as the foundations of the future crypto landscape are being built today.”
You can check out the community letter here.
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