The only way to see them is by suspending assumptions and broadening your field of view.

8. Crypto Should Use Different Benchmarks

For example, instead of competing against one another in some absolute sense, by reference to quantitative benchmarks (ex: transactions per second), crypto racers may benefit from looking far beyond usual comparable variables (“crypto transactions per second” v. “Visa transactions per second”).

Instead of trying to squeeze as much transactional horsepower out of one second as possible, crypto developers may be better served by rethinking the essence and structure of a transaction altogether.

Here’s an example of a new quantitative performance benchmark for crypto. There are many more benchmarks like this.

9. Crypto Must Understand The Needs of Crypto “Consumers”

Today’s big crypto projects are like B2B operating systems: they serve as platforms upon which other second-tier, third-tier consumer-oriented applications will be developed.

Bitcoin is the “Unix of money.” Ethereum is the “Linux of crypto.” IOTA is the “FreeBSD of the machine economy.” And so on.

This approach gives development teams much needed respite from torrents of individual consumer demands for greater transaction speeds, overall utility, more security, etc.

But this approach also has the disadvantage of creating a buffer between the developers of crypto operating systems and the end-users of those operating systems.

Crypto should stop getting high on its own supply; instead, crypto needs to understand what non-crypto people need from crypto.

Today’s biggest need area are easy-to-use applications that plug normal people into the crypto economy. All crypto developers benefit from successful end-user applications like this. All crypto development teams have a shared responsibility for incubating end-user applications like this.

10. Crypto Platform Shopping is Real

The way CleanApp fell into crypto is similar to the way many people learned about crypto.

In 2015, we started doing legal mechanics for several crypto projects, and started educating ourselves on the rapidly growing range of crypto projects, platforms, and possibilities.

When we started seeing more and more bells and whistles, and so much chrome, and so many Lambos and Maybachs outside, we began to wonder — Could blockchain be the key for a hyperutility CleanApp?

Vice versa, was CleanApp the “missing killer app” that crypto was desperately searching for?

Predictably, our answer to both questions was “Yes” — a global waste, hazard, incident reporting process would be baller as a set of on-chain markets that are integrated with real off-chain response processes. It yields noticeable material improvement, everyone’s better off, etc. etc. etc.

But that’s just context. We’re not plugging anything. This isn’t a sales pitch. It’s analysis. This part of the story is just better told by sharing our own experiences with crypto platform shopping.

And so we started looking. Should we start sucking Ether? Should we get en-Tangle-d? Should we seek ConsenSys? Or go towards OmiseGO?

11. Crypto “Features” Must Come Standard

One of the things we noticed early on in our research was that all end-user oriented crypto platforms lacked a basic feature — the ability to easily earn crypto by doing socially-useful work.

To us, the need for this “feature” is as obvious as the need for a seat belt in a car.

As a form of micro-finance, crypto is an ideal vehicle for incentivizing the production of socially-useful material service (like street sweeping, litter cleanup, common-area maintenance, etc.), tracking the inputs, aligning potential transactional actors, and reaping the value of global I/O analytics on these underlying processes.

Despite the obvious value and utility of an app like that, there wasn’t and isn’t a crypto platform that makes development of globally-scalable apps like this easy.

Ethereum comes close, but, among other problems, Ethereum’s transaction volume/bandwidth limitations mean that near-real-time rewards corresponding to real-time inputs would be all but impossible at billion-user scales (billions of daily transactions). IOTA seems like a possible fit, and we’re amidst that learning curve at present.

So, upon examining the Studebakers and Packards, and noticing that they’re missing seat belts, we did what you’d expect reasonable people to do: we asked the developers for seat belts.

Crypto’s response? If you want seat belts, build your own damn car!

12. Don’t Shift Development Burden to Users

In order to realize its full potential, crypto needs to continue permitting hyper-specialization. Folks who are really good at mechanism design need to focus on mechanism design; folks who are really good at enterprise integration need to focus on enterprise integration. Not everyone has to be developing platforms.

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

But the only way to free developers to specialize is to assure they will have meaningful choice between the crypto platform Studebakers and crypto platform Fords.

1920 Studebaker “Big-Six” Touring Car: $2350

1920 Ford Model T: $575

13. Hyperutility = Higher Earnings

By 1924, Ford had sold its 10,000,000-th car (for comparison, the U.S. population in 1924 was 114,000,000).

The Model T kept getting cheaper ($575 in 1920 v. $295 in 1924), with objective improvements in quality in every product cycle.

What was the key to this impressive and unprecedented growth? Answer: the automobile offered material hyperutility.

The Model T’s key selling point wasn’t “economical” service in the sense of just cheap do-it-yourself maintenance.

An explicit Ford selling point was that buying a Model T increased the buyer’s earnings.

Please note: it wasn’t just “the automobile” that made individuals’ lives more efficient, and made sweeping broader economic efficiency gains possible. It was the barrier-smashing Ford Model T that did that.

The Model T sold a healthier, more productive, less-stressful, more efficient, and more bountiful future.

14. Be Honest About Risks & Costs

Every hyperutility app is like a knife. It can be used to cut apples, or to slice an opponent’s tires.

Crypto’s lesson from the car industry in this respect is a contrastive one: what not to do.