The “token war” continues. Who will come out on top?
“Something with a value of nothing will continue to be worth nothing unless change is made…”
Even though my main objective with this writing is not to place Ethereum or any other similar projects in a negative perspective, it needs to be said that tokenization, unfortunately, has one of the most significant impacts on the cryptocurrency market at the moment. The token is not the key problem, but rather the people. However, if you take it one step further, you can ask the question, “Whose responsibility is it if people are becoming armed? Are the people who obtain the arms responsible or those who provide these arms?”
Where did the problem start? Everyone who’s familiar with cryptocurrencies knows that tokenization started to become prominent with ICOs. If, at this point, we were to delve into statistical analyses, we would see numbers that would probably shock a lot of people. Promises and results have, regrettably, drifted away from each other.
Let’s be very clear from the beginning. I would not want to moralize, but most projects have probably never really had real intentions to innovate their technology. This statement can be proven by the tremendous amounts of crafted imagery that were continuously being used to mislead investors. We are talking about immense teams, countless advisors and zero results. I would also refrain from generalizing, but it’s difficult to deny the factual statistics. I dare to ask the question, “How many innovative ideas have been realized out of those projects that started off with tokenization?” By innovative ideas, I mean real, useful results/achievements; not concepts that are decades away from reality.
Despite my critical view on the matter, I must also add that tokenization has played a major role in the popularization of both the blockchain and cryptocurrency. The question is, “…at what price?” Nowadays, there is a constant flow of new projects on the market that spark hope in people by making huge promises. However, people’s eagerness for investment is continuously declining. Many exchanges have launched their own tokens, which I can partially understand. Yet, I regard it as an unethical move. My perception of how things should work may be naive and innocent, but I do believe that tokens should not consider speculation their primary goal. Rather, they should be the expression of values and the financial fund for the creation of these values.
A lot of times, I witness a project that features a token on the market which reaches a point of popularity where their position can become stabilized on the exchanges. When this happens, somehow previous promises start to become overlooked, and the community perceives the profit realized by the token as the real result/success. For me, this is nothing else but a new type of Ponzi scheme which is being disguised as a cryptocurrency business.
This problem has largely contributed to the current prevailing conditions that we are experiencing on the market. Many people have been turning away from cryptocurrencies as investors have suffered billions in losses due to tokenization. It takes 5 minutes to generate a new Ethereum-based token which is then promoted under a newly initiated blockchain business that claims it can change the world. On a serious level, does that seem valid to anyone?
A whole industry has been built upon this phenomenon, and now we have to face our own irresponsibility while biting our fingers. I watch the news every day, and I rarely come across any happenings that could truly add anything to the recovery of the market’s reputation. Marketing and PR companies specializing in ICOs and IPOs are no longer able to support as many projects as they did before because crypto-communities are becoming more and more aware of the real situation at hand.
So as not to leave the reader with a completely negative image, I would like to add that there are many projects on the market — even those with a token basis — that have real, valuable intentions. The role of these projects is to reassert the direction that Satoshi Nakamoto once created. After all, the whole purpose was not to turn today’s already false financial and economic environment into an even falser one, but to create a more transparent system which can be guaranteed and delivered by the blockchain. Truth be told, what most blockchain projects are missing is but one single thing: the blockchain itself.
As a salesperson and marketing expert, I totally understand that almost everything can be explained in one way or another. After all, if I were to join Ethereum blockchain which has the Ethereum smart contract, then I, indeed, would have a smart contract project. With proper communication, it is easier to cover the truth and therefore positively present the “facts”. However, in this case, “facts” have more than one meaning, and the truth is that this type of perception of smart contracts contributes way less value to the blockchain than most people suppose.
Years ago, the ILCoin Development Team opted for a much more difficult path. We did not participate in this “token war”, nor did we want to. From the very beginning, we have been following the principles that were set by Satoshi Nakamoto. However, as is common knowledge, Bitcoin also has its shortcomings. These constraints are what we have been working on for years; those which ultimately have led to the creation of C2P and the RIFT-protocol. Both of these developments speak for themselves, and by following our example, I sincerely hope many other projects can create similarly valuable solutions in the future.
