A blockchain-based startup could have a product/service as part of what they are developing, but their stride is best hit when they are also creating a self-sustaining circular economy that is supported by their own currency or tokens and where there is a transactional loop between earning and spending these tokens within their ecosystem.
Ideally, it is important to communicate exactly when large amounts of tokens become unlocked and therefore available in public exchanges. It is a good practice to continuously update these exchanges with the right amount of tokens in circulation.
Many regulators are quick to apply existing compliance practices that treat tokens as a security, therefore elevating the barriers and costs of implementation for entrepreneurs.
Until there are tangible metrics for quantifying the real value of a token's utility, the gap between value and valuation will continue to defy conventional wisdom and conventional valuation methods.
For the first time, companies can be their own payment processors without the cumbersome or costly aspects of traditional financial settlement options. Tokens offer a much lower barrier for processing end-to-end transactions inside a given market.
As much as one would like to think that what China does doesn't matter, the reality is that when China sneezes at crypto, the rest of the world catches the cold.
I am very excited about the prospect of using cryptocurrency, not just as a money equivalent, but using it as a way to earn something as a result of doing some type of work.
If you have your own currency, you have your own governance, so each currency becomes their own mini-government. Mini-government is a big word, but it's a body that is governed in a decentralized manner where users have a say, where there's oversight and transparency.
Few incumbents will succeed in deploying blockchain applications to enable new business models. The innovator's dilemma will prevail. Even if they aspire to, they must first get their feet wet within their business boundaries.
In order to grow-up, blockchains will eventually need a lot of standards that are vendor- and solutions-agnostic. So many areas are ripe for standards developments: smart contracts, tokens, security, storage, messaging, identities, naming, record-keeping, and more.
My advice to many ICOs is to start reading about startups and focus on the product, customer, and market as soon as the sale is over. And don't get distracted by post-ICO euphoria and the price of ETH or BTC.
When (not if) regulators start looking at ICO deals they might want to investigate, they will likely start with the ones that exhibit weaknesses.
I'm looking forward to seeing more ICO projects provide increased clarity about the performance metrics expectations they plan to exhibit during their future adult lives in addition to the assumptive utility of that token they are selling.
As we prepare to enter the cryptoconomy, undoubtedly it looks fuzzy, foggy, risky, buggy, uncertain and unproven, but so did the Internet in 1995.
Tokens should not be listed before the start of the operations on the network, platform, or application. This is where many ICO's seem to have lost their ways, and that's risky.
If blockchain technologies ignore the eventuality of standards, we are going to see less adoption. Maybe we should think of the blockchain as a public-good utility and encourage an evolution that is not unlike the Internet's in terms of openness and neutrality of access.
In my opinion, one of the most exciting potentials of the blockchain relate to creating new business models, whether in public or in private settings. In most of these cases, the new models don't care for incumbents because they are mostly on a disruption quest.
Cryptocurrencies are not evil and are not for money launderers and scammers. They are for entrepreneurs, technologists, change-the-world dreamers, and anyone who believes they can (and will) enable new business models, new types of organizations, and new ways to service consumers and businesses alike.
The token itself is not your new business model. What the token enables for you and for your users is the key part to focus on.
Most blockchain platforms don't share that much in common, resulting in choice lock-ins, lack of interoperability, and potentially dead-ends that are hard to untangle.