I wanted to offer my thoughts on where the cryptocurrency scene is headed, since EOS briefly broke into the top 10 and DASH broke into the top 6 this week. 

Recent scaling issues with Bitcoin and Ethereum have given us a lot to think about. Specifically, I want to talk about DASH and EOS. While DASH and EOS are not the only coins with long-term technical solutions for scaling, they are tackling scaling issues in tandem with user experience issues, something not frequently talked about among crypto circles.

User experience is everything.

Early personal computing has come very far since the 70s. We’ve learned since then that the end-user experience determines whether a technology can reach mass adoption. 

That’s why scalability matters. They matter because reliability is the first foundation for a usable system. 

Whenever we talk about usability, we talk about it as if we’re the user. In truth, the user is all relative – it depends on who will end up using it. 

We can’t compare Bitcoin to Litecoin, or Litecoin to DASH when talking about scaling issues, because each of these coins have been designed for different uses – whether they reach mass adoption depends on whether the technology develops to actually support these specific uses at scale. 

So, user experience is also a technical concern. But it’s also a branding and marketing concern, and an anthropological concern. Every technology has its uses, whether it was consciously designed those use cases or not. But more often than not, we don’t know for sure who might end up using them.

Uses and users of cryptocurrencies and distributed ledger technology

Let’s look some of the top 10–15 coins right now by market capitalization. Based on what we know, let’s try to map out each coin’s intended use and potential users.

Bitcoin

Intended use: Bitcoin, being the oldest of them all, is most in doubt. It was initially a solution for low-fee micropayments, but Bitcoin’s fees are now too high for this dream to be achieved.

Potential users: Users are likely investors or speculators who see Bitcoin as a hedge to gold.

Ethereum

Intended use: Smart contracts

Potential users: Businesses, government agencies, decentralized organizations

Ripple

Intended use: Inter-bank payments

Potential users: Banks

Litecoin

Intended use: ???

Potential users: ???

Ethereum Classic

Intended use: ???

Potential users: ???

DASH

Intended use: Digital cash

Potential users: Non-technical people who currently use fiat money for everyday payments

NEM

Intended use: Business blockchain stack

Potential users: Businesses

Stratis

Intended use: Business blockchain stack

Potential users: Businesses

IOTA

Intended use: the Internet of Things

Potential users: Hardware manufacturers, adopters of IoT hardware

EOS

Intended use: Consumer-facing blockchain stack

Potential users: Web developers

Bitshares

Intended use: Trading digital representations of real-world assets, or crypto-derivatives. According to Bitshares, “the freedom of cryptocurrency with the stability of the dollar”

Potential users: Traders, speculators, investors

Monero

Intended use: Untraceable cash

Potential users: The paranoid, crypto-nerds, criminals

Zcash

Intended use: Untraceable cash

Potential users: The paranoid, crypto-nerds, criminals

Wheat from the chaff 

If we predicate our assumptions based on how likely it is for a blockchain network to reach mass adoption among its target user group, then we’ll have a clearer picture of what to invest in, but also more importantly, which technologies to adopt when designing new decentralized applications. 

At this point, I would like to refrain from speculating on which coins will eventually win out as blockchain tech matures, as it’s difficult to tell how technical challenges, governance challenges, and new applications present themselves.

What we do know, now that we’ve asked the question, is which the most promising ones are. And, over time, we will see a few unlikely winners that are not Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Litecoin, and a few that are not currently in the top 10 in terms of market cap right now.  

DASH is the most promising of the lot, solving for how regular people will one day use cryptocurrencies for everyday expenditure, by focusing on consumer UX and network reliability. 

EOS is the next most promising of the lot, having proposed a unified development stack for developing consumer-facing apps powered by the blockchain with a few smart defaults such as human-readable account names rather than public keys, a no-fee policy for end-users, and high transaction throughput. EOS is the Ethereum to DASH’s Bitcoin, in that sense. Its focus on developer experience and user experience makes it more favorable than Ethereum for building consumer-facing apps. 

Nimiq promises a blockchain development platform for creating consumer-facing, just like EOS. What makes it really special (and we’ll see if this approach works in the long term), is its ability to run nodes natively in the browser with full mining capability on commodity hardware like phones and laptops. What this means is that users don’t have to install a separate blockchain client like Ethereum, which requires the use of Mist or Metamask, and users self-secure the network since they become part of the blockchain. It’s all very Pied Piper.

NEM, Stratis, Lisk, and Hyperledger, like EOS, all focus on creating a complete development stack for developing blockchains. Unlike EOS, their focus is on business applications, instead of consumer-facing apps. In terms of business mass-adoption, they are competing with Ethereum, and it remains to be seen if this is a “one winner takes all” situation.

Ripple and Stellar focus on the backend of financial transactions, hoping to power cheaper and faster currency exchange between banks. In this regard, they coexist beautifully with DASH in a world where cryptocurrencies are widely adopted by regular people.

IOTA is like the backbone for hardware bots, which will serve us in an autonomous internet of things future the same way DASH and Ripple power payments of the future. This is the hardware to Ethereum’s software. 

Aragon is a special thing indeed. It uses a blockchain to govern organizations complete with shareholding, voting, bylaws, and accounting. Indeed, the “business logic” of the future will no longer be an imperfect representation of a corporation, but a digitally-native abstraction.

IPFS lets us store documents in the blockchain. Documents are permanent, unlike webpages that can disappear. That allows for all sorts of use cases such as smart citations, meaningful two-way links between documents, and the “true web” that isn’t tied together loosely by a hrefs. 

District0x combines Ethereum, Aragon, and IPFS to help organizations be governed and managed on the blockchain, which builds on the Libertarian/cryptopunk ideal of the “decentralized autonomous organization”, an organization that runs without a central authority, where decisions can be made transparently and democratically.

And that’s just scratching the surface of the cryptocurrency universe. It’s an exciting time indeed, with new uses of blockchain being thought of, built, and tested. If you’re a designer or developer working in this space, or simply an investor in cryptocurrency, it helps to keep in mind that all of this technology is built for humans, and beyond the technological mambo-jambo, there’s immense value that has yet to be created.

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