OST is best positioned to bring blockchain to the mainstream because it’s in our DNA.

OST was founded on two counter narratives to the then prevailing blockchain market sentiment.

First, in mid 2017 — when the market had reached peak ICO euphoria — we theorized that 99.999% of companies should not, cannot, and will not ICO. We foresaw a tightening of the ICO market. This led us to build blockchain infrastructure and tools to enable any business to benefit from having their own branded tokens to transform their communities into thriving economies, but without the legal, regulatory, and technology costs and risks involved with ICO’ing. We developed blockchain infrastructure and developer tools to enable businesses to easily deploy branded tokens as stored value on auxiliary chains, sans ICO, backed by staked value on Ethereum.

Second, while the rest of the industry jumped immediately to building DApps (distributed applications) and platforms and technologies for DApps, we theorized that while DApps are part of an exciting future, they will take many years to materialize and gain traction, especially while user experiences lagged consumer expectations. We also saw that too many DApps were taking the “if you build it they will come” approach to growing audience, rather than building distribution into the product strategy. Instead, we envisioned that mainstream companies with large existing user bases could create the first mass-market blockchain big wins.

This led us to create turnkey blockchain technology for mainstream apps with millions of users. Internally we call these mainstream apps “Mappys” (mainstream apps) vs. “Dappys” (completely decentralized apps). I’ll write more about Mappy, Happy, and Dappy personas for blockchain development in my next post.

Building for Mappys required us to solve a wide range of challenges around the usability of blockchain that Dappys largely ignored, such as:

SaaS dashboards, APIs and SDKs for non blockchain developers to easily deploy, integrate, and manage token economies without learning how to write blockchain code

Decentralized key management solutions for end-consumers — solving for the usability of blockchain for the mass market

Methods for scaling blockchain economies to internet-grade transaction volumes on today’s proof of work systems

Economy stabilization services

KYC as a Service on behalf of our clients

Simple graphical interfaces for programming smart contracts

While the rest of the industry went immediately down the Dappy road, only to find Dappy adoption to be elusive, OST currently has a massive head start on preparing to launch Mappys on public layer-2 Ethereum blockchains in 2019.

The OST technology stack and roadmap has been entirely informed through our ongoing collaboration with Mappys.

The result is that OST has emerged as the blockchain technology partner of choice to Mappys.

Companies like Unsplash, Hornet, Animoca, Passkit, and Metaps — businesses with tens of millions of users — chose to launch on OST versus other options because OST is the only full-stack and full-featured blockchain platform for mass-market app tokenization that lets them deploy and test at-scale in 2019 with low risk so they can focus on their core business rather than becoming blockchain experts. Importantly, OST will take on any regulatory and licensing burden on behalf of our clients and their end-users, which would otherwise be a huge gating factor for mainstream companies.