Last week CoinDesk reached out and asked several questions related to Koinify and published a few of the comments in a story, “Crypto 2.0 Roundup: The Overstock Effect, Counterparty Debates and a Crypto iTunes.”

Readers may be interested in a few more of my thoughts below.  [Disclosure: I am an advisor for Hyperledger and head of business development at Melotic.]

• As of today, Koinify is probably the only serious venture-backed startup that solely focuses on building decentralized applications and decentralized autonomous corporations (DACs).   It is also setting some ‘best-practices’ in transparency that has been largely missing in this community.  You will see that soon with Koinify’s following announcements.
• The biggest problem in the altcoin/decentralize app space is that virtually all of them lack any original utility, are blatant scams or simply cannot fulfill the paper-based promises of their vocal promoters.  In short, virtually all digital asset projects have thus far been overpromised and underdelivered, including, arguably Bitcoin itself and we see that with a dearth of mainstream end user adoption for any of them.  What I’d like to help provide Koinify is the knowledge of the past, to avoid the pitfalls of other projects.  To accomplish this, Melotic is looking to provide liquidity to unique curated assets, potentially those incubated at Koinify.  Thus, this is a mutually beneficial partnership.
• I have been following the growing list of distributed computing and computational consensus proposals.  Beyond the annual academic Dijkstra Prize, the nascent digital currency space has been fast in proposals but slow in actual production-level roll-outs.  To be frank, I have been fairly disappointed with both the quality of product and traction of 2.0 projects in general, especially given the community euphoria in the first quarter when I did research for Great Chain of Numbers.  However, with that said, if something like Bitcoin is allowed to be given a 5-6 year “grace period” I think it is only fair for a similar runway to be given to other proposals as well.  Furthermore, there are economic trade offs depending on the level of trust and consensus required, but shoving everything onto one ledger, some kind of jack-of-all-trades Houdini ledger, is a bit like the clown car at a circus.  It can be filled with a cornucopia of clowns and coins (and clowncoins) but the economic incentives might not align with the duct tape holding it together. Consequently, the community has evolved and created several new potential methods for untrusted nodes on a public network to arrive at consensus, to the point where consensus-as-a-service is becoming its own commoditized subindustry.  In the future, this will likely be abstracted away and developers will be able to fine tune and granularize the level of centralization and trust they want to expose their users to.  Another big development that I am increasingly paying attention to is the regulatory and compliance arena, which many people seem to want to ignore and handwave away.  It is not going to disappear and structuring your project, company and even ledger in a way that reduces your personal liabilities will be an ongoing concern from now on.  There is no point in being a martyr when there are many other areas to push the envelope on in this expanding space.
• A few weeks ago I gave a presentation covering a number of factors as to why Bitcoin protocol development has plateaued in the past year and as a result how most of the innovation has effectively been outsourced to the altledger ecosystem.  Here a steady stream of both old and new entrepreneurs and developers are toying with variables that cannot be touched with Bitcoin itself due to its current development cycle.  A friend compared the speed at which this industry moved with dog years and this is particularly true in the altledger space.  As a result, a new ledger can be forked, tweaked and spun up that incorporates the latest ideas in this space.  Most do fail and will likely fail in the future, but that’s the nature of iteration in technology.  The biggest challenges for Koinify is on boarding high quality decentralized apps that bring the utility and value that is now expected by the community.   On the one hand creating a platform that allows access to something like cryptosecurities such as Overstock.com sounds neat, yet it is a hundred year old idea (equity) married to a different type of database (a blockchain). On the other hand, the decentralized app economy that Koinify is attempting to create is in fact has a different form, yet still pragmatic enough given existing technology.  Market participants want to experiment, poke, prod and have choices — this effervescent vitality is attractive and I am excited to try and help out.