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In my 2019 tech predictions column for Newsroom, I had this to say about crypto and blockchain: This time last year, I was predicting continued growth for crypto and blockchain. How wrong I was on that. So I’m naturally more circumspect now about the chances of cryptocurrencies and blockchain making an impact in 2019. What…

Read More My hopes for crypto in 2019

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I just posted my annual top 5 technology trends post on my personal blog. One of my key trends was the crypto crash of 2019 and the stalling of blockchain innovation. As you all know, it’s been stormy weather these past few months. What I wrote sums up my feelings about cryptocurrencies and blockchain as…

Read More Crypto community: time to focus on product, not price

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I’m currently following a bunch of cryptocurrency startups hoping to disrupt the media business. I’ve already written about a few of them: Civil, Narrative and Po.et. There are also a number of social media products built on blockchain, such as Steemit (a crypto Reddit) and Peepeth (a crypto Twitter). Finally, there are as-yet unlaunched crypto media projects…

Read More 5 ways crypto is disrupting media

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Dapps, a.k.a. decentralized apps, have up till now been hard to find on the Web. But the blockchain browser company Blockstack aims to change that with its new directory, Universal Dapp Store. This could be a turning point for dapps, because Blockstack has the heavyweight backing to popularise the use of distributed apps. The company counts Fred Wilson’s Union…

Read More Blockstack’s Dapp Store: today’s version of the Yahoo! directory

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I’ve been thinking about some of the problems of blockchain startups and what (if anything) can be done to address them. The fact is, this “Web 3” revolution has been very slow to get going. I had expected it to ramp up faster, but instead the industry is still overly focused on cryptocurrency speculation and…

Read More 3 problems the blockchain industry must fix

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It’s currently a barren landscape for DApps, with CryptoKitties still the most high profile decentralized app to have been built on a blockchain. As Chris McCann from the VC firm Greylock Partners put it, “we are orders of magnitudes away from consumer adoption of DApps.” He went on to say that “no killer app (outside…

Read More Peepeth launches a decentralized Twitter