Technology is progressing so quickly these days that if you aren’t “keeping up the Joneses,” so to speak, then you’re behind the eight ball. That’s exactly what Kickstarter realized this past week when it announced that it is pivoting its website to the blockchain. While the company can’t fix its challenges with the wave of a magic wand, there’s still plenty of reason to welcome Kickstarter to the Blockchain Revolution.
For more than a decade now, Kickstarter has been at the epicenter of a crowdfunding revolution, convincing independent creators to build their dream projects and cut out profit-taking middlemen. Indeed, it’s spawned a number of noteworthy projects since its 2009 inception, including Peloton, Oculus VR, and many more.
In many ways, the crowdfunding spirit of Kickstarter echoes what’s going on in today’s digital economy. But crowdfunding has lost its luster in recent years. For every success story, there are plenty of not-so-successful stories, with some high-profile campaigns burning through Kickstarter cash only to never see the light of day.
As its decline became evident, Kickstarter had to painstakingly admit to its investors that it wasn’t a hypergrowth company after all. It changed its designation to a public benefit corporation and began paying shareholders a dividend rather than reinvesting its profits toward the growth of the company.
Today, money that we would have seen flowing through Kickstarter’s crowdfunding platform 10 years ago, has begun to grab headlines by flowing through distributed autonomous organizations, or “DAOs.” Take, for instance, last month’s auction of a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution, wherein a DAO – known as “ConstitutionDAO” – attempted to raise enough money to buy the rare copy. While the DAO managed to raise $46.3 million from its many thousands of contributors, it was outbid by Citadel CEO Kenneth Griffin.
The point, however, was made – traditional crowdfunding is outdated… DAOs are where it’s at.
Knowing that, we’re not entirely shocked Kickstarter has decided to embrace crypto. It’s a way to bring the company back into mainstream relevance while updating its centralized architecture to a more consumer-friendly decentralized architecture. But it’s got a lot of work ahead of it as it attempts to rebuild its crowdfunding platform on blockchain technology, offering the ability for anyone to create their own crowdfunding site on its open-source protocol, built on the Celo blockchain.
While a lot of folks aren’t exactly thrilled at Kickstarter’s decision, we see the adoption of blockchain by centralized companies as a part of a unified march toward mass blockchain adoption. Really, it’s no different from how the internet gained mainstream acceptance.
As more and more consumers became comfortable putting their data online, they realized the myriad time- and cost-saving benefits that the internet offered, and thus began using the internet in their daily lives for various processes.
We believe rising blockchain adoption rates will set the stage for cryptos to soar much like rising internet adoption rates set the stage for tech stocks to soar in the 2010s. The difference, however, is that the global blockchain takeover will happen much faster than the global online takeover.
It took the internet about 30 years to become ubiquitous around the world. We believe cryptocurrencies, decentralized finance (DeFi), and decentralized applications (dApps) will do the same in just 10 to 15 years.
By the early 2030s, most of the world will hold at least some money in cryptos, most merchants will accept payment in cryptocurrency, and most applications will be built on the blockchain.
Even Visa recently revealed an R&D project to build a blockchain interoperability hub that connects different blockchain networks through one single payment channel, allowing for the transfer of digital assets between blockchains through a single exchange.
Why is that significant?
Well, right now, blockchains are engaged in a sort of pseudo-tribalistic war with each other.
That’s because blockchain networks tend to act as universes unto themselves, without an easy way to communicate with other blockchains outside of any single network. The result is a culture of maximalism, where supporters of one blockchain network feud with supporters of the next blockchain network.
This lack of interoperability in the blockchain world is a huge barrier to consumer adoption, one which the Blockchain Revolution needs to break down in order for regular consumers to feel less intimidated by everyday use.
We see it as the biggest hurdle to the mainstream adoption of cryptos.
Which is why we recently introduced a new crypto into our premium research advisory Crypto Investor Network, which we believe can solve this problem once and for all. We don’t hesitate to call it the perfect solution for the market, and the cryptocurrency behind this game-changing solution has immense upside potential.
As more legacy companies follow in the footsteps of Kickstarter and Visa, adopting blockchain, this crypto will become the unifier that takes the Blockchain Revolution to the next level. Although I can’t tell you its name here, click here to learn more about the crypto that could turn into a fundamental ubiquity in the Blockchain Economy.
On the date of publication, Luke Lango did not have (either directly or indirectly) any positions in the securities mentioned in this article.
