- Dominik, the IOTA co-founder talked about the massive growth crypto has seen in the past decade, growing from an internet sensation for nerds to the mammoth industry it is now.
- He believes the future is bright, with IOTA leading the charge towards a decentralized world in which interacting with machines is seamless and betters our lives.
In this week’s IOTA Talks, Dominik Schiener discussed the significance of the Coinbase IPO and contrasted the success of cryptocurrencies today with their humble beginnings on the Bitcoin Talk forum in 2012. This was the epicenter of crypto, where early adopters met, exchanged ideas, talked about exciting projects, and from where many innovations were launched (including Ethereum, Ripple, PolkaDot, and IOTA). Now the entire crypto space is valued at $2 trillion, far greater than those early adopters could have imagined.
Regarding the many successful builders in this space, Dominik remarked, “We have continued to grow, even when the tides were against us.”
One opposing sentiment through the years was the frequent comparison between cryptocurrencies and the tulip bubble. Dominik emphasized that Coinbase did not make $1.3 billion last quarter using smoke and mirrors.
There is real interest, there is a real business model, and there is a real need for crypto, he asserted. Unlike the tulip bubble, where the assets never recovered, millions of users around the world are benefitting from the utility of crypto and trading hundreds of billions of dollars in assets.
On what the need for crypto is in the current era, Dominik pointed out, “We live in a world where you earn negative interest rates, where you don’t control your data, where centralized systems are abusing our rights, and people are looking for alternatives.”
The only thing that fundamentally makes sense in this new world are crypto assets and decentralized systems. They make our world more resilient and more secure, but also more fair and equitable. It is about giving people rights over their assets and data, to give them freedom and opportunities over how they build their future.
Dominik emphasized that the main reason they are building IOTA, making it free and open-source, is that they want a huge ecosystem, an open community, where everyone can benefit from these technologies and from the new applications and products startups are making that leverage IOTA.
It’s really about creating a new future, together with all of you. We are on the right path to change something, to build the future.
He emphasized that IOTA will soon be production-ready as the only feeless, scalable, secure, soon-to-be fully decentralized distributed ledger technology. IOTA unveils its updated network, called Chrysalis, on April 28th.
Even if there are short-term hiccups or down markets, I am long on the crypto space and long on IOTA,” says Schiener. The Coinbase IPO is just a start, he believes.
This is the future we are building, where machines talk to each other and transact with each other, where we transact with the machines, and where we have an open society and open economy where anyone can participate freely, with the same level of access to opportunities.
