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Alternative Market Briefing

The digital assets world struggles to find a 'killer app'

Friday, January 24, 2020

Bailey McCann, Opalesque New York:

What will it take for blockchain and cryptocurrencies to expand? Delegates at the recent Opalesque Miami Roundtable suggest that the digital assets market needs a 'killer app' that will usher in a new era of widespread use. To get there, however, more infrastructure needs to be built and the user experience will have to improve.

"I don't think we are even at the app stage yet," said Mark Yusko, Founder, CEO and CIO of Morgan Creek Capital Management. "I still think we are at the protocol consolidation stage. We still haven't decided what's going to be the base layer protocol, whether it's Bitcoin, whether it's ethereum, whatever it happens to be at the base layer. Then we have to think about next layer protocols like Polkadot and Cosmos, because ultimately we are going to have a stack of protocols, just like the Internet."

Yusko notes that in the creation of the internet as we know it today, it was protocol development that supported the creation of web browsers and simple websites, well before we saw the creation of applications like Facebook or Netflix. Facebook's Libra, for example, could end up being more equivalent to Netscape in terms of where the digital assets space is in its evolution. "I am very interested in which business models get attacked by decentralization," Yusko adds. "Decentralized finance is clearly going to be a monster winner."

The digital assets space is also likely to u......................

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