He said: “The problem with the blockchain space right now is there are too many people with too many vested interests. There are folks who have invested millions of dollars into mining rigs and the like, and hundreds of startups and ICOs with little more than a whitepaper and a cool idea who have taken the millions of dollars from their ERC-20-based token raise, to build solutions that will never be able to scale to meet real-world use cases.

“These are the last people who are going to tell you that the blockchain is flawed, even if they increasingly have the sneaking suspicion that the tech might not be able to deliver on its promises.”



Shane, who was involved in the early days of the internet and whose first website was ranked "9th Most Useful Place on the Net" by Yahoo back in 1997, calls the current situation “a wild west”, full of misinformation but said that it’s simply natural selection at work.

While long-term investments in crypto-currency are still generating phenomenal returns year-on-year even with the recent pullback, he believes there will be a tipping point that clears the way for IOTA to become one of the few remaining DLTs of choice. He does not claim that Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple and the others are all doomed; indeed he can foresee a time in the not-too-distant future in which there are multiple winners and an Ethereum Smart Contract might execute and trigger an exchange of value and/or data on the IOTA network as just one example of interoperability. But he believes that there will be a lot of contenders who don't survive.

He said: “The smart money will be where the real scalable business solutions lie not with the rumour and the innuendo fuelling the FOMO buying we saw this past December.



“Like the dotcom boom and bust, in which companies with no solid foundation vanished, that didn’t mean the internet didn’t ultimately transform our lives. I expect to see similar major shakeouts in the crypto world.”



He added: “The retail investor will buy into whatever is being promoted as the latest shiny thing on CNN or MSNBC, because they don’t have the knowledge, or willingness, to do the research to differentiate between the smoke, the mirrors and the real thing. I believe that IOTA is the real thing ... but that’s a personal opinion, not investment advice.”



A member of the IOTA Evangelist Network, Shane is working closely, and on a purely voluntarily basis, with the non-profit IOTA Foundation in Berlin, although he is not a formal member. He is launching the bIOTAsphere, a not-for-profit IOTA Commercialization Lab facility, in Toronto, Canada this May



Shane is investing his own funds in the initiative because he believes this technology will not only transform the world but make it a “better place for my children and grandchildren”.



He said: “IOTA did not set out to be a speculative crypto-currency as its raison d'etre and the IOTA Foundation believes that the price of the coin is often a distraction from the more important work they are trying to do. Their primary vision is to be a protocol layer upon which future solutions can be built, and they are not alone in that view.

“Major corporations like Bosch, Fujitsu, VW and others are making their own big investments, and betting on the technology and the solutions that they are embedding in their future product and service offerings. Governments too, like the Municipality of Taipei, Taiwan (population about 3 million) are taking note and betting on IOTA for their Smart City initiatives.