Crypto Adoption Accelerated

By Iconic Holding on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

By Patrick Lowry, CEO-Iconic Holding

When I am invited to speak at events, I think the question I am asked most is “Where is crypto heading next” or “What price will Bitcoin hit this year?” Frankly, these are BS questions asked by the ignorant and ill-informed. Allow me to educate!

The value of cryptographic technology extends well beyond the mere price of Bitcoin. While Crypto Twitter will disagree and will shill their preferred version of Bitcoin or altcoin to no end, the true value of crypto is the underlying distributed ledger technology and what it enables in finance and decentralized applications. This is why I view the adoption of crypto through two lenses; financial institution adoption and user applications, with the former occurring first and already underway.

I have made my stance on tokenization very clear, but in case you don’t follow me on Twitter, please allow me to divulge… every single financial and real-world asset will be a crypto asset. Every equity, debt, derivative, parcel of land and bar of gold will be tokenized. This inevitability is due to the transparency, fungibility, and liquidity through fractionalization that tokenized assets offer in a globally inclusive financial market. That is why institutional adoption will be forced by market pressures. You read that right, FORCED, albeit not by us crypto enthusiasts.

“Why will financial institution adoption be forced though? This seems a bit extreme,” you are undoubtedly thinking. Well, the answer is actually relatively simple… costs. Namely, the Cost of Trust.

Financial services ranging from banking to wealth management are by-and-large a commodity. These institutions fight tooth and nail to limit their costs of operations in a run to the bottom on costs. Yet, these institutions collectively spend billions each and every year in an effort to trust one another, and for consumers to trust them. This comes in the form of custodians, audits, KYC/AML, and other compliance measures, all so the financial ecosystem does not fall apart entirely (aka 2008) through a lack of trust.

Crypto Assets inherently solve this issue. The tokenization of all financial instruments eliminates the need for various trust layers through the transparency and immutability blockchain enables. Factor in other benefits such as financial inclusion, fungibility, and liquidity of illiquid markets through fractionalization, you can quite clearly see why institutions will be forced to adopt crypto assets in a sheer act of survival. This transition is already beginning as Fidelity, JPM, ICE, and other major players have already entered the space.

The second phase of crypto adoption comes from retail end users of decentralized applications. Unlike financial institutions who will be cognizant of their adoption of crypto assets, however, retail users will have no clue they are interacting with the blockchain.

Think about it… while you read this article on your mobile or computers browser, do you actually know or care if the engaged internet protocol or TCP/IP or https? When you make that purchase on Amazon, do you care or even know if the payment is made via SEPA, Swift, Western Union or some other exotic method through various correspondent banks? Unless you’re a tech or finance nerd, your response was very likely “What on earth are you talking about, Pat?”

And this is where we’ll see crypto adoption of decentralized applications… when people don’t know or care they are interacting with a blockchain on the protocol or payment level. What is missing in crypto is the wonderful User Interfaces and Experiences (UI/UX) we are accustomed to in our daily lives on our devices. This is largely due to the blockchain space being largely inhabited by technologists who are building wonderfully advanced, albeit complicated technology, but sadly have no clue how users prefer to use it. As more business leaders enter the space and build proper UI/UX on top of the backend crypto layer is developed we will begin to see application adoption occur. Once this occurs, users will begin to see all the benefits of personal data ownership and privacy that we in the space are already familiar with.

There are of course other factors inhibiting adoption such as scalability, trust and general lack of education on crypto topics. I did not address these here because so much is already made of these issues in the public forum. At Iconic, we are focusing on both lenses of adoption through seeding the most promising blockchain projects developing some of the most promising real-world dapp use cases, and through the launch of AMaaS platform, permitting any asset manager to launch a compliant crypto asset fund and better execute their investment strategy.

The future of crypto is bright, and only getting brighter as mass adoption looms!