CEO of CoinsPaid Predicts the Future of Blockchain
Max Krupyshev, CEO and Co-founder of the financial ecosystem and cryptocurrency payment gateway company CoinsPaid provided some key insights on the current state and future of blockchain technologies during their primer on blockchain, as a part of Founderly’s Third Wave Web3 program.
The Explosive History of Blockchain
Max broke down the history of cryptocurrencies into 3 distinct periods. The first of which is the time between the years 2009 and 2015. They titled this initial stage as the time before Ethereum when Bitcoin dominated the space, pointing out that there wasn’t a lot of innovation happening in the space at this point. This period is mostly marked by the start of coin mining and using crypto as a method of payment.
Max then moves on to discuss the timeframe between 2015 and 2017 when Ethereum first showed up followed by the advent of layer one blockchain technologies and smart contracts. Max highlights how the arrival of these new features allowed people to start creating the first decentralized applications that lived primarily on the blockchain. Many companies were quick to start generating tokens and figuring out how to integrate tokens into their business model during this period. USDT, one of the first examples of a stablecoin as pointed out by Krupyshev also made its debut during this timeframe.
Lastly, Max sheds light on the most amusing period in crypto, the period from 2018 onwards. Max explains how this period has garnered the most innovation and expansion in the crypto space, with wrapped blockchain technologies being introduced, multi chain assets have become a common occurrence. Multi-chain assets allow tokens to be distributed on multiple blockchains, meaning Ethereum tokens can be transferred through the bitcoin blockchain, or bitcoin tokens could be transferred over the Solana blockchain.
The explosion of wrapped technologies has allowed multiple companies and individuals to create their own tokens to represent their assets, some are regulated and others are completely chaotic and phoney.
“People started playing with wrapping everything into the token, some of them are regulated, some of them are not regulated, and some of them are complete scams”
NFTs or Non-Fungible Tokens have also been prevalent during this period, however, Max believes the industry still needs to evolve in order to properly take advantage and utilize NFTs productively. Max does however highlight a key usage of token technology in Defi or Decentralized Finance, which encapsulates tokens that are classified by defined assets such as fiat currency allowing developers to create entire ecosystems using smart contracts backed by Defi tokens; the value of which can be evaluated using real assets giving them a form of liquidity.
The Innovative Future of Blockchain
Max then moves on to some future and innovative uses for blockchain technologies which they could see coming to fruition. Quickly distinguishing a key characteristic of the blockchain is the ability to classify and track transactions and predict how payment processors and merchants may in the future use blockchain as a way to verify payments to make sure the information is immutable and accessible to all parties, as an alternative to services like Visa and Mastercard in the current day.
Krupyshev hopes governments would adopt blockchain and decentralized technologies as they would allow governments to take advantage of higher forms of verification, especially regarding voting and other transactions requiring high levels of trust and security.
Max indicates that blockchains may simply replace some existing workflow technologies such as databases where the sensitivity of records needs to be preserved, however, they are quick to identify how these changes would only occur where there is a logical reason to use blockchain over existing solutions, recalling the advent of the smart contracts and illustrating how many companies during this period tried to use blockchain for everything which was not productive or conducive to further innovation in the space.
The power of blockchain as a key preservation tool is specified as well. Due to its ability to track and preserve history and changes, blockchain can be used as a tool to preserve human history, a pivotal feature in a period where many are trying to rewrite history.
Taking note of the environmental impact and energy consumption of crypto technologies, Max asserts the need for better sources of energy to be utilized in order to mitigate the environmental impact of crypto technology. Highlighting how using traditional means of energy generation has served humanity well, but in order to meet the high demands of energy for crypto technologies moving forward, adopting more sustainable sources of energy would only be more beneficial.
Max Krupyshev sees many industries evolving and adopting blockchain and crypto technologies to better serve their needs. Calling towards governments, finances and logistics-based organizations as being able to quickly take advantage of integrating blockchains into their workflow. They anecdotally illustrate how simple solutions would be the key for companies to break into the crypto space, using the story of a Canadian start-up assigning tokens to trees which when purchased and used in the production of guitars allowed the final purchaser of said guitars to be able to track the history of not only their guitar but of the tree using their own token. Having lived through the explosive growth of blockchain and crypto technology over the past decade Max looks optimistically towards the future of this space.