My time at the 2018 London Blockchain Expo was fascinating and exciting for many reasons. I want to write about my personal experience meeting the Stratis team and spending time with the Stratis community, and I hope I will get round to writing it soon (though I’m sure I won’t do it as much justice as Khilone has here). This post, however, will concentrate on what is most important to existing and potential investors — STRAT, and what the Stratis Platform means for its future.

(To try to avoid confusion, I will refer to the coin of the Stratis Platform’s blockchain as “STRAT”, the company as “Stratis” and the suite of products as being encompassed by the “Stratis Platform”)

As an investor in crypto, there’s one question you need to be sure you can answer: “Why will someone buy my coins from me for more money than I paid for them?” If you don’t have an answer to that question, you’re not investing: you’re gambling. To be able to answer it, you need to understand what will introduce value to a coin over time.

The principal value of any coin is the value initially invested into a project divided by the total initial supply of coins. For example, let’s say $1m is invested into a project during an ICO and there are 1m coins generated; in this situation, the initial value of the blockchain’s coin is $1 per coin. Any value the coin has after this initial value is created by movements in price.

A movement in the price of a coin is caused by one thing and one thing only: an imbalance in supply and demand.

For the purposes of this post, supply is the number of coins being sold at any one time and demand is the number of coins being bought at any one time. Let’s say the price of a coin is $10. If someone is buying 100 coins, but only 50 are available from someone who is selling them at $10, then the buyer will have to buy the other 50 coins at a higher price. If demand and supply aren’t equal, then the market price has to change. “The Law of Supply and Demand” is exactly what we outlined above: “If there is a disequilibrium in supply and demand for a resource, the price of the resource must change in such a way as to restore equilibrium.” This all makes sense intuitively; if more people want to get hold of something than want to get rid of something, that thing is going to become harder to get.

Armed with this understanding of the introduction of value to a coin, we could change our above question from “Why will someone buy my coins from me for more money than I paid for them?” to “Why will the disequilibrium of supply and demand for this coin increase in favour of demand after I buy?” With this in mind, I’m going to break down exactly why we should be excited about what the Stratis Platform will do to create demand for STRAT.

If you want to use any feature of the Stratis Platform, you need STRAT. I’ll talk about four of these and why customers will need STRAT to use them. These are: