This is a bit of an overlap post for me. Many readers may know that I have been active in the cryptocurrency space the past year. It’s a bit of an open secret. In fact, I have dug in extremely deeply, extremely quickly. It’s an exciting space — for a lot more reasons than the price speculation that’s been going on.
Crypto asset and blockchain projects remind me of the tech fervor of the late nineties and early two-thousands. In fact, in many ways, I think this space is just an extension of the web we already know today.
Many of the projects people are working on are web related, or related to removing centralized entities as a source of reliance with the web. “Centralized” and “decentralized” is a very common refrain in the crypto world. Yet, it’s also perfectly logical. The social networks we flock to, the companies we rely on to run our websites, the browsers we use, the payment networks we rely on — are all reliant on central entities that run them.
One of the great — and highly experimental — promises of crypto is an ability to remove middle entities across a broad array of industries, and the web is a huge one. I know of active projects aiming to replace browsers, web marketplaces, user systems, hosting, database layers, and pretty much every other component of the web.
We will continue to see projects that aim to decentralize this or that, or put this or that on the blockchain; some will even have specific components geared toward WordPress, as it powers 29% of the web. Just in the last week, one of the most exciting projects for bitcoin — the Lightning Network, aimed at vastly increasing transaction speeds — announced a WooCommerce integration as one of the earliest implementations of the technology.
Whether you like it or not, and whether the price of bitcoin and other crypto assets goes up or down, crypto and blockchain technology is here to stay.
I’ll be covering this space as a part of what I do with Post Status. For one, I’m enormously interested in it. Second, it will impact our space in several ways over the coming years.
I think it would be wise for product business owners to consider how blockchain technology can impact your company and your entire line of business. Odds are, someone somewhere is working on it. I am convinced the way we use and interact with the web will include aspects of this new world of technology over the coming decade, and I want both myself, and you, to be ready for it.
