“The next phase brings real use cases that enable people to use, earn and transact… We call this the utility phase.” — Coinbase via Twitter

Coinbase recently tweeted about spending an incredible six years working toward their mission of a more open financial system for the world. They say the first phase of cryptocurrency adoption (the investment phase) is now making way for the second critical phase of cryptocurrency adoption (the utility phase). Ink Protocol has been focused on the utility phase since the very beginning of the project and believe this phase will be even more exciting for blockchain adoption, cryptocurrency enthusiasts, and tokenized software platforms.

At Ink Protocol, we are creating a globally trusted p2p marketplace transaction system, with transferable reputation.

Why Utility?

Bitcoin is often referred to as a store of value, a decentralized savings account, or even digital gold. This means that simply owning bitcoin is enough for you to get real world utility and value out of the cryptocurrency. It doesn’t necessarily need any additional use cases in order to gain mainstream adoption and relevance. Due to the network effects of being the first and most widely known cryptocurrency, bitcoin will likely dominate this position for some time and therefore has a real use case just by existing.

The same cannot be said about the thousands of other blockchain projects, cryptocurrencies, and tokens out there. Most of these will only stay relevant long term if they enable real utility for the people who use it.

Perhaps the most popular cryptocurrency with an immediate real use case is Ethereum, which is a blockchain-based distributed computing platform for running smart contracts. It is essentially a decentralized server and database, and Ink Protocol is built on top of it. Ethereum is providing real utility for projects like ours, and we couldn’t easily do what we are doing now without a platform like Ethereum.

Only a handful of other projects come to mind that have real use cases today, and we are proud to say that Ink Protocol is part of that short list. However, if Coinbase is right, we hope to see a sharp increase in projects with real world use cases soon, with Ink Protocol as one of the first projects leading the charge.

How Ink Protocol is Ushering in the Utility Phase

Ink Protocol is a fully decentralized reputation and peer-to-peer transaction system that you can use to safely buy and sell on any marketplace platform. We launched the project by integrating it into the Listia marketplace, which has over 10M registered users who have bought and sold 100M items since 2009. Over a million items have already been listed on Listia using XNK, and that number is growing daily.

However, even though we have seen early success with real use cases on Listia, that is only the very beginning. The next step for Ink Protocol is easily allowing anyone to buy, sell and earn public Ink reputation on any marketplace (not just Listia). You can actually already do this today, but you need to have a technical understanding of Ethereum smart contracts, so it isn’t widely used yet. Our upcoming Ink Pay app will change that, making it super easy to transact on platforms like Craigslist, FB Marketplace, and many others.

Here are a few sneak peeks at some of our app mockups and UI designs. The first version of the app will be released soon (before the end of Q2, exact launch date TBD) and allow anyone buy, sell, and earn transferable reputation for all marketplace transactions. We think this use case has huge potential to transform the way people transact, eventually powering the future of fully decentralized marketplaces. Real use cases are at the core of what we are building every day.

Even though the Ink Pay app is coming soon, this is still only the beginning. The world is just starting to realize the potential of blockchain technology, and once it does.. we will be poised to achieve our mission of building a globally trusted p2p transaction system for any marketplace. You will no longer be subject to the high fees, strict rules, and siloed personal data of today’s marketplaces. Transactions will be free or extremely low fee, and you will be able to use your own data as you please.

Thanks to our entire community for following along and believing in our vision to completely transform the way people transact with each other. We believe the utility phase is going to be massively more exciting and transformative than the first phase! More news and updates coming soon…