If your user base engagement is fledgeling, a token may not be the panacea unless it is properly threaded into the product, and user behavior is accompanying the token utility.
An aftermath of real failures can make the whole blockchain ecosystem more resilient because it will result in revealing the boundaries and realities of what's possible, useful, absurd, impossible, repeatable, and scalable out of everything that appears plausible and innovative at the beginning.
The world is preoccupied with dissecting, analyzing and prognosticating on the blockchain's future; technologists, entrepreneurs, and enterprises are wondering if it is to be considered vitamin or poison.
Big companies do not want to disrupt themselves. All they want to do is improve themselves. They see the blockchain as another IT project. It's going to save money; it's going improve a process here and there. It's not going to change their business.
In the increasingly digital world, data is a valuable currency, yet as consumers, we control and own little of it. As consumers, we must ask what big companies do with our data, a question directed to both the online and traditional ones.
If you haven't used Bitcoin first-hand, you may not get the inherent advantage of a quicker appreciation and understanding of its potential. Seeing assets move swiftly without intermediaries is an eye opening experience, and that is just a starting point.
What Bitcoin started is metamorphosing into something bigger: a 'crypto-tech'-driven economy with its own value creation, not unlike the Web's own economy. Welcome to the cryptoconomy.
If you think about the web, the web has been an incredible development platform, and everything today is developed on the web. In the future, everything is going to be developed with the blockchain in mind.
You have to think of the blockchain as a new utility. It is a new utility network for moving value, moving assets.
The blockchain cannot be described just as a revolution. It is a tsunami-like phenomenon, slowly advancing and gradually enveloping everything along its way by the force of its progression.
Blockchain infiltration will be met with resistance because it is an extreme change.
The old question 'Is it in the database?' will be replaced by 'Is it on the blockchain?'
Just like paying a toll to use a freeway, the token can be the pay-per-use rail for getting on the blockchain infrastructure or for using the product. This also ensures that users have skin in the game.
The blockchain is custom-made for decentralizing trust and exchanging assets without central intermediaries. With the decentralization of trust, we will be able to exchange anything we own and challenge existing trusted authorities and custodians that typically held the keys to accessing our assets or verifying their authenticity.
The blockchain is an asset normalization platform that can enable a new liquidity in transactions, hence creating large networks of usage and value effects with benefits in speed, cost, quality, or outcomes.
Study how to write smart contracts, which is the basic unit of programming a blockchain for business purposes. It is the equivalent of being taught HTML and Java during the early Internet days. And master how to create assets or tokenize existing ones on a blockchain.
Government leaders should get up to speed on the blockchain by understanding it first and committing to exploring its potential.
Let's hope the Canadian public sector starts putting the blockchain on their agenda so we can see a significant difference in how government services are delivered.
The blockchain applications market is unravelling along a segmentation of activity that is spread along two sets of variables: private vs. public blockchains, and new vs. existing business models.
A token is not a short term carrot, nor a stick for that matter. Just having a token doesn't mean that you have a working business model attached with it.