In this guest article by Wolf Pup #0, he is going to explore a couple companies to keep an eye on as blockchain continues to be reinvented and grows into maturity.
To explore the future of blockchain, I believe that there are two core concepts that need to be present in our base knowledge;
1) Innovation does not scale.
2) What is ubiquitous is best when it’s invisible.
Innovation does not scale…it diffuses as information.
Let’s use the following statement as an example:
“You just have to bridge that over to polygon, I would use USDC since it has the deepest liquidity”
If that information or innovation?
It depends.
If that statement above gives you more clarity/closes the gap of uncertainty, it is information to you. If that statement above make you more confused or widens the gap of uncertainty it is innovation.
What is information to one person is innovation to another. Innovation increase uncertainty and, therefore, does not get adopted. In fact, when people put out innovation thinking that it’s information, it can delay adoption significantly by introducing new uncertainties/making people more confused.
When innovation becomes information to a segment of the population it will begin to get adopted by that segment. That’s slightly oversimplified but you can see a deeper dive on it for more clarity here: Innovation, Innovation and the Future of Blockchain
For adoption, the focus should be on bridging the “base knowledge disconnect”, turning what is information to you into what qualifies as information to someone else.
The Ubiquitous Is Best When It’s Invisible.
Most people have never interfaced directly with Amazon Web Service, but AWS is ubiquitous. Every time you watch Netflix, everything you download on iTunes or the Apple store, anytime you use your smart electronics from GE… you are relying on AWS. There are games, which I will link to later in this article, that are built on the blockchain the the user would never know unless we told them. Blockchain, at its best, will be everywhere, but it will be invisible.
Learn more on Invisible Ubiquity here.
What It Looks Like
Remember, it will be helpful to understand the concepts above to start to understand the practical application and potential implications of what is below. Believe it or not the further off we are in our estimates about what it will look like in ten years, the better. In other words, the more reinvention that is allowed, the better the tech diffuses – true progress would be the technology taking a shape and form we couldn’t even conceive of today.
It’s valuable to document these iterations/microsteps and study them so that we can understand what it looks like in real life and learn to recognize it in realtime.
That said, let’s look at some new tech that is turning innovation into information and mapping their deliverables to the Diffusion of Innovation curve effectively:
Polygon Studios
Polygon Studios has adopted the identity as the “normie chain”. Collaborating with Starbucks, Disney, Coca Cola, etc acts as a forcing function to focus on technology and addresses some of the biggest limits to mass adoption.
If you watch the video on Diffusion of Innovation linked above, you will be able to map their new technology directly to the five adoption decisions.
(We have more coming on Polygon, so not going to blow my cognitive load on this section.)
Polygon is worth watching, as they seem to be a step or two ahead of everyone in terms of removing limits to adoption.
Sequence Wallet Tech
Horizon has incredible gaming and MetaVerse tech. You can go to their website and demo some of their games, you won’t even be able to tell they are built on the blockchain. But in terms of adoption, their biggest contribution is the wallet tech.
Their Sequence wallet remove the risk and headache of onboarding fiat through a CEX and most of the headache of switching networks (which is a complexity considerations). We did a short write up here that will get you started down the Sequence rabbit hole:
That’s it for now.
Originally I had 3-4 more projects to list, but if you actually want to understand what is going on, there is enough in this article to keep you busy for weeks. Go down rabbit holes, test the tech, open some loops and let them stay open.
Remember, innovation gets attention. It’s useless until it’s turned into information. It’s more important to us that we help turn innovation into information so that our members can modify their behavior/make their decisions in a way that is beneficial to them than it is to get a bunch of views because of “cool news”.
‘Tis the TGA way.
If you find this useful, experiment. If you learn something in your experimentation or going down your rabbit holes share it with others. Want blockchain to diffuse? Do your part.
Onward,
Wolf Pup 0