Over the past few months, we’ve witnessed a significant decrease in the price of many cryptocurrencies – most notably, Bitcoin, which has fallen from a staggering high of almost $20,000, back down to a modest $10,000 as of 23rd February 2018.
Whilst it makes sense to assume this price drop would also affect ICOs. However, this has definitely not been the case.
As it turns out, ICOs are still flourishing, and many investors are still turning a healthy profit. More importantly, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the price fluctuations and potential gains of Bitcoin are far from the most exciting thing about blockchain technology.
So far, ICOs have raised over $1.7 billion. Last month alone, there were over 90 new ICOs.
The Rise of the Blockchain – The “Internet 2.0”
Over the past year or so, blockchain technology has been gaining popularity on a huge scale. The rise of blockchain provides many advantages to society. The most notable advantage is that it increases the level of trust and security between organizations.
The technology is so revolutionary that it moves us away from the “Internet of Information” and towards the “Internet of Values” – also known as the “Internet 2.0”.
The Internet of Information brought about huge change into our daily lives – and the Internet of Values is about to change it all over again, by introducing digitization, decentralization, decentralization, and inclusiveness into the process.
Blockchain provides us with a secure, direct way of exchanging money, digital assets, and other property, without the involvement of middlemen and third parties (such as banks, the government, etc).
Blockchain is growing so rapidly that The World Economic Forum’s whitepaper, “Realizing the Potential of Blockchain” published in 2017 has predicted that by 2027, 10% of the world’s GDP will be stored on blockchains.
Without a doubt, one of the most promising and exciting uses of blockchain technology is within the financial sector.
However, thus far we have yet to see any real progress that bridges the gap between centralized and decentralized organizations.
Fusion is a “Blockchain of Blockchains”…
FUSION is a public chain that can connect all other blockchains and off-chain data sources and provide complete financial functionalities.
It is designed to solve the three main issues within blockchain ecosystems: interoperability, scalability, and usability. As it stands, these are acting as bottlenecks to the Internet of Value. As we move ever-closer to the new age of the Internet of Value, FUSION aims to create a new system that enables the transfer of value in terms of tokens.
It will be a faster, more scalable, and ultimately more efficient system than other solutions. This is largely as a result of its unique Proof of Stake (PoS) and Proof of Work (PoW) hybrid consensus mechanism. It will fulfill virtually all of the functions of traditional financing, but in a distributed, more efficient, and less expensive manner than before.
The application was founded by DJ Qian – a superstar Chinese entrepreneur who was formerly behind Quantum and VeChain. So far, FUSION has been overwhelmingly successful. Within the first 24 hours of launch, their ICO managed to raise over $50 million.
Moving Towards the Era of Cryptofinance
Cryptofinance is defined as the on-chain financial activities of the Internet of Value, and their related off-chain financial activities. Cryptofinancial applications will be the main applications of the Internet of Value.
The most important feature of CryptoFinance is that financial products will mainly be represented on blockchains, and transactions will primarily be accomplished through smart contracts. Off-chain assets will be tokenized into cryptofinancial assets, while on-chain financial products will mostly be represented by smart contracts.
However, blockchain cannot solve all of our problems, and centralization will remain an important feature of our society for the foreseeable future. As a result, it is expected that in the future centralized organizations will co-exist with blockchain communities, and it is this that will ultimately form the Internet of Value.
As development progresses, it is likely that traditional financial institutions will gradually be transformed into service providers for cryptofinance.
It will be a huge step forward, but we might be much closer than most people would think.