chains and blocks suspending cubes over a green background, very emotional painting
The economy is rough. Crypto companies are collapsing. Scandals abound. And yet, blockchain tech is still, as they say, “early.”
I spent 18 months leading engineering at a blockchain startup and have three key industry failure takeaways you need to know about where we are today with the technology.
1. The Absence of Foundations
Building a product in the blockchain space before 2022 was like arriving at a construction site without the necessary materials or equipment. Not only did you need to build the structure, but you also needed to mine and smelt the ore to create the building blocks.
Blockchain technology first gained popularity through its initial and most basic application: cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin officially emerged in 2009, a year after the academic paper introducing it was published. But blockchain has the potential to do so much more than just facilitate cryptocurrency transactions. It’s a technology that has the power to validate data independently of any one company or person.
The future of blockchain depends on the tools that are available. We progress by building on previous innovations. With Bitcoin (and later Non-fungible-tokens, NFTs) being the first uses of blockchain to gain mainstream visibility, the early stages of creating the tools and building blocks to enable more complex ideas were skipped before the public had a chance to evaluate or speculate.
In 2021, my team was working on ideas for a blockchain-first login system, but we had few options and no viable solutions for using a third-party service or leveraging another company’s offerings for this task. And our core business was not about developing new login methods for websites. So, we needed to build our own solution, which was good, but probably not as good as the solutions that future startups would dedicate their entire business to developing.
Technology…
