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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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Civil aims to use blockchain and “cryptoeconomics” to provide a sustainable business model for journalism. But its grand plan reminds me a bit too much of the politicking in the Star Wars prequels. Do we need a written constitution, voted on by cryptocurrency holders, to decide what’s ethical in journalism? Does freedom of the press…
Read More Civil wants to be the Jedi Council for journalism
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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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Love or hate blockchain and cryptocurrencies, you can’t deny they’ve made a big impact on the Web’s evolution over the past several years. I don’t necessarily believe there are “versions” of the Web, but I’m going to appropriate the term Web 3.0 anyway. Mainly because it helps try and identify what’s changed on the Web;…
Read More Defining Web 3.0 (aka making sense of blockchain)
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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
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In my post yesterday bemoaning the slow progress of Ethereum’s scaling solution, Pete Abilla tweeted this response at me: Richard – I dig you, ever since your @RWW days. But bro, how can you miss the only – THE ONLY – blockchain project with a working sharding solution: @zilliqa. DM me and I’ll get you…
Read More Zilliqa one-ups Ethereum by implementing sharding
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It’s been an ongoing bear market for cryptocurrencies in 2018, including for the top two coins: Bitcoin and Ethereum. The main causes of bear sentiment seem to be worldwide regulation issues and other concerns around legitimisation (for example the blanket ban on crypto ads by Facebook, Google and Twitter). But another factor is the continuing…
Read More The misty realm of Ethereum scaling solutions