‘Tis the season for the crypto/blockchain world to get back on track.

What a shit year 2018 was. Or, to spin it in glass-half-full terms, if that’s your thing: The crash is good. It weeds out the lambo hunters. Win!

I just don’t want to hear about it anymore, especially as we’ve now seen a few good days in the markets and everyone is back to talking about them.

One truth: The market plunge had the real world calling bullshit on all our grand promises and predictions as startup founders. The “normals” have all gone back to their day jobs and their daily pain points, which is where I want to focus your attention for 2019. Solving real problems for real people and businesses.

I 100% agree with a recent quote by Vitalik Buterin in the MIT Technology Review, from a story about how Ethereum is “running out of time” to change the world. The magazine notes that Vitalik himself scolded the Ethereum community around this time last year, tweeting:

“How many unbanked people have we banked? How much censorship-resistant commerce for the common people have we enabled? Not enough.”

Amen. We, as an industry, still have a LOT of work to do along these lines heading into the New Year.

First, we have to separate the crypto market from the advancement of blockchain technology in the enterprise and startups. Yes, it was a tough year for crypto prices, but there was also a lot of progress with people discovering the true power of the technology.

At Dispatch, we launched our new main network, and we’re looking forward to growing it as an app ecosystem in 2019, adding projects and new dApps daily. But frankly that shit is boring AF. If it’s just a better mousetrap, who the fuck cares?

I kinda like mice!

Dispatch is looking for dApp developers solving new problems, in new ways, that spread value more widely. Developers really innovating everything from self-driving cars to AdTech to CDNs to medical records. I want to see data become sovereign to the people, and privacy of your data take hold. New platforms disrupting the old ones. Come one, come all.

As CEO of Dispatch, I traveled a lot this year, from China to Malta to China again. But, as always, it took a trip home to Troy, New York to get the right perspective.

If we can transform 10 or 20 companies in old industrial centers like Troy, it will do a lot more to move our company, and the industry, ahead — and to validate distributed-ledger technology in general to the wider world — than any number of things we might do to impress our peers already working in the blockchain space. For us at Dispatch, it’s about returning control to users, restoring data integrity, and empowering different industries to grow using zero-knowledge analytics.

2019 for us is about the “third cities” of America. It’s about the developing world. Watch for our growth strategy here in the next few months.

Now, bring on the New Year.