No Need for War Between Bitcoin, Ethereum: The Future Collaborative “Web” of Cryptocurrencies

There will be more collaboration than competition in the coming brave new world of cryptocurrencies. Different chains will work together, not against each other.

Collaborative Trends

Humans tend toward oversimplified, all-or-nothing thinking. This tendency manifested itself in the crypto space in the form of tribalism; Ethereum will beat Bitcoin, Lisk is the Ethereum-killer, Monero’s far superior to Zcash. You get the picture, as you’ve surely heard it all before.

Yet this us vs. them approach is antithetical to one of the most dominant trends in crypto, namely collaborative proliferation. The constant launching of new projects and token start-ups that are designed, either directly or indirectly, to help other projects see greater functionality and efficiency.

To this end, the so-called “maximalists” in the community would be better served to become “agnostics”; this is simply to say that there’s no point in hedging all your bets on one cryptocoin when so many chains will succeed together precisely in many cases because they work together.

This increasingly collaborative environment seems to indicate a cryptocurrency renaissance is much more likely than a cryptocurrency die-off over the next two decades.

As high-profile crypto venture capitalist Tim Draper put it in recent comments to the press, fiat currencies may soon go extinct as the number of cryptocurrencies—and their use-cases—explodes:

“Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will be so relevant […] there will be no reason to have the fiat currencies…They’re all going to interrelate […] and there will be exchange rates for all of them. My guess is that it will centralize around a wallet that you have, and when you pay for that Starbucks, your wallet will optimize to whichever currency has most value.”

To Draper, then, a future with thousands of cryptocurrencies working in unison seems exponentially more likely at this point than a future in which paper money endures for several more decades.

Raiden & Ethereum and ChainLink & Confido

As cryptocurrencies that enhance other cryptocurrencies continue to proliferate, soon enough the crypto users of the world will behold an interconnected web of blockchains that will be used to bolster one another.

For example, consider the new ERC-20 token, Raiden (RDN). Raiden provides an off-chain scaling solution for Ethereum through creating what’s known as state-channels—transaction process zones that lie off-chain and can facilitate extremely affordable and nearly instantaneous microtransactions.

In a specific sense, then, Raiden “attaches” itself to bolster the performance of the Ethereum network, bolstering the value and utilities of both itself and Ethereum in the process.

Also, consider the case of Confido and ChainLink. Confido combines with ChainLink’s smart contract capabilities to make an innovative crypto escrow payment service that could gain a lot of traction in the coming years.

These are but two examples of what will be a seemingly limitless array of interconnected cryptos. This massive web of collaborative projects will boost the success of the entire space.