Thoughts going into NYC Blockchain Week

NYC Blockchain Week starts today for me.

Bookended by events hosted by friends–Bill Tai at the Fluidity Summit and William Mougayar and Nick Tomaino at the Token Summit.

The week looks excellent.

Conferences, a solid group of meetings and I’m certain endless impromptu conversations. My friend Hue Rhodes calls the blookchain sector–the ‘Olympics for the world’s smartest people working on solving the biggest problems’. He’s not wrong about this.

Deeply curious for the most studied and current opinions on the big four Qs: Classification of Tokens, Custodianship of Digital Assets, State of Regulations and Stable Coins.

Excited about getting face to face with so many people in the trenches building stuff and this year, rolling out Dapps to the market.

Prepared to be overwhelmed by a new crop of more powerful decentralized exchanges with every variation of custodianship.

And bringing my personal agenda of topics that interest me professionally for my own work in the space:

My top five list:

Cyrpto-based payments

I can’t shake my interest in this as an early market touching solution and example of market fit.

I also believe that just as payments were strategic on the web (ala Stripe, Square, others) how this plays out in broader terms on the blockchain will be much more so.

I view the Cannabis and CBD crypto payment solution set as obviously highly economic but also disruptive as it rolls into and changes the legacy payment/gateway space in the US.

Tokenzation of behavior

This is literally the trillion-dollar question for this sector.

The mass of disdain towards the lack of transparency and mismanagement of our data by Facebook and an overall malaise towards the legacy advertising model has opened the door to a decentralized social net in concept.

What this really means? Is this really possible?

Is by nature, behavior tokenizable? This is the question that sketches out the roadmap for the future.

Cause-based crypto currencies

There is a lot of talk about the gestalt of tokenization. How it needs to play to a business model or behavioral reflex.

But—as Bill Tai points out–tokenization is also a communal act of support.

I’ve spoken about how I wish Cryptokitties would incorporate nonprofit, social targeted support for closing kill shelters, focusing on adoption of sheltered cats. Bill has spoken about the idea of how endangered species can be supported through a Cryptokitty off shoot infrastructure.

This is generosity, not simply token integrity with community behavior and human social dynamics.

Is it possible to tokenize and support causes—social good—through these project as an offshoot of community good will?

Unpacking the mythos of token utilization

Many thinkers in the space have been posting lists of how to evaluate the integrity of a token into the behavioral integrity of network.

Truth is that no-one really knows and while thinking of the token as integral to the behavior of the participants, is a good start, the variations on this are still wildly divergent and inchoate.

By every one of these definitions, XRP is poor token design for Ripple as there is no correspondence between the token and the business model. Maybe so, but they have a negative customer acquisition cost by shadowing their service with XRP. And a larger disconnected market cap with the tokens then the business itself.

Infinitely interesting, important and completely unclear.

Community and market-based marketing

How we market to our communities, tokenized or not, and how we market to a broader-based world of end users is connected, but not the same.

Or is it?

How projects that are built on community development dynamics extend beyond that group to the mass market (as in payments) opens up a critical discussion of how to design the brand, how to configure positioning and the very language around how we message and tell stories about who we are and what we do.

Contact me

I am working in the space and open to discussions around these topics.

During the week arnold@waldstein.com or text at 408-497-8317 with links to who you are and the why of the contact are encouraged.

See you around the city!