CWC Newsletter #44 (November 11, 2020)

By Taylor Ryker, Analyst

Invigorating the EOS Community: Practical Steps for Mass Adoption

Did you hear? Colin Talks Crypto reduced his EOS position for Ethereum.

Colin Talks Crypto, an influencer in the EOS and Crypto Twitter community, wrote about his decision to reallocate his portfolio citing his loss of faith in Block.one and EOS governance. I respect his decision but Block.one is still very supportive of the EOS public blockchain and progress has been made for governance over the past year.

EOS is decentralized and the EOS community is beginning to realize that they should not rely on Block.one for everything, in terms of token price, investments, and leadership. If we are not dependent on a central authority, we need to re-focus on the community.

How do we rebuild the EOS community? How can we take it upon ourselves to grow the ecosystem? How do we reinvigorate the community?

To answer these questions, I think we first need to make it much easier for veterans and new users to interact with the EOS public blockchain with ease. A few days prior to Colin Talk Crypto's revelation, Chaney Moore posed a question to spur discussion around this very issue of community, which elicited many thoughtful responses.

One response in particular caught my eye:

Shane Calfee (a.k.a. Two Bits) proposed a practical solution for better user experience through the creation of a simple one-stop website. This one-stop website will make it much easier for outsiders to easily onboard themselves to enjoy the growing dApp ecosystem, such as Emanate, Upland, and others.

There are currently growing user tools that abstracts the difficult understanding of EOS resources, such as Wombat Wallet, Anchor Wallet, and TokenPocket Wallet. However, I think there needs to be an official website that users can then decide which wallet they would like to use.

Ironically, several days earlier, Tai Zen, a professed Bitcoin OG, ranted on youtube that he had lost all faith in EOS because he was unable to set up a wallet and transact on EOS.

Coincidentally, Colin Talks Crypto's announcement about reducing his EOS position came on the heels of Tai Zen's criticisms.

Well it's a good thing that they--Colin Talks Crypto and Tai Zen--do not represent the entire EOS community. We need to rally around the issue of making it easier for users to use the EOS public blockchain by building on Shane Calfee's suggestion.

First Practical Step Towards Rebuilding Community and Mass Adoption

This first practical step will target EOS users, developers, and investors. There needs to be a comprehensive place for anyone to go to when they want to interact with the EOS public blockchain in addition to other EOSIO and non-EOSIO blockchains.

Similar to Shane Calfee's suggestion of a one-stop website, some other EOS community members took the initiative to begin a website (eosmain.net) to serve as a portal to onboard new EOS users.

To support this endeavor, I encourage the community, if you have time, to help compile useful and relevant information that could possibly be included on the website. This website can also spotlight the growing dApp ecosystem while creating an environment of supportive dApp development and usage.

EOS Arabia compiled this website: https://allthingseos.one/ in order to provide a one-stop shop for EOS users and developers. It needs some updates but overall it is a great guide for the new EOS user.

There are other helpful materials and content for beginners from media outlets like Hodl EOS, EOS Nation, EOS Go, EOSWriter, Cypherglass, Everything EOS, and LiquidApps.

This is my explicit promotion to please support the efforts around creating eosmain.net and please chat with the team on Telegram.

I will discuss in future Newsletters on building and sustaining the EOS community so please look out for the next installments of my ideas and thoughts. But for the time being, I want to showcase a real-world example of EOS where users were able to create their own accounts and wallets while building a marketplace community in Venezuela.

EOS MicroLoan: Real-World dApp, Good User Experience, and Growing Community

After focusing on user-onboarding and user-experience, how can we re-build and invigorate the EOS community?

Joe Louis recently highlighted the progress of EOS MicroLoan in Venezuela where everyday people use EOS to facilitate peer-to-peer business transactions. When people half way around the world on Twitter griping around governance and Block.one, there is a growing and thriving community that relies on EOS for commerce.

Real-world practical uses of the EOS public blockchain are highlighted more by Joe Louis:

If these non-technological Venezuelan users can leverage the EOS mainnet for their businesses by opening up wallets, I am confused by the fact that a bitcoin OG like Tai Zen had a difficult time. Here, CryptoMoe explains how users help each other set up EOS accounts and wallets:

However, regardless of Zen's unwarranted attack on EOS, the community needs to make it easier for users to understand how to open wallets and interact with dApps. Tequila, an EOS community member, relayed his views on what should be a better user-experience with regards to wallets.

And Greymass answered Tequila's call with a pay-per-transaction model that will allow users to not have to manage their resources (CPU, NET, and RAM):

With this growing trend of more user-friendly products, I can foresee more adoption with the abstracting away of resources. Mass adoption will be more possible with an easier approach to resource management.

But what about the regulations and mass adoption?

Block.one, Regulations, and Mass Adoption

On a side note, Block.one CEO Brendan Blumer tweeted on Monday about the regulations and compliance that needs to be resolved before mass adoption can occur on EOS and within the cryptocurrency ecosystem. If you are interested in last week's Newsletter, it deals with the regulation issue in relation to the growing capitulation in the EOS community.

With Block.one fighting in the trenches with the regulators, the crypto-space is becoming more attractive to traditional institutions, once there are assurances in place that the "Wild West" of crypto is tamed. Blumer believes that, "both traditional and crypto ecosystems facilitated by compliance will continue to pave the path of mainstream adoption."

This will lead to what Blumer is calling "programmable finance" or ProFi, an evolutionary step to the unregulated space of DeFi (decentralized finance like Uniswap).

With compliance as a focal point, other EOS-based dApps like Chintai are poised to benefit from the demand for fully-regulated tokens. Chintai's regulated blockchain finance fits perfectly with Blumer's vision of ProFi where financial institutions leverage blockchain technologies to safeguard their auditable data.

However, only time will tell. Many EOS community members would like for faster progress but long-term success relies on building a strong, deliberate foundation. For EOS and Block.one to be successful, they need the foresight to anticipate future problems, and regulations was the biggest hurdle towards mass adoption.

Conclusion: Reinvigorating the EOS Community and Mass Adoption

It may seem like a daunting task ahead of us. However, keep a stiff upper lip, dig your heels into the sand, and know that there are others from around the world who believe in EOS, who develop on EOS, and who use EOS. We do not have to merely have faith in EOS; open your eyes and see the coming wave. Hope you're ready--Let's do this!

See you all next week for another round of the CoolWave Capital Newsletter.

Go EOS!

For More EOS and EOSIO coverage: EOS Nation's Hot Sauce, EOSWriter's EOSIO Week in Review, Crypto Peter's Moran Post, and EOS Go's What Happened This Week on EOSIO.

Disclaimer: Taylor Ryker is not a financial advisor and holds the digital tokens or cryptocurrencies represented in the content above. This content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice. Nothing contained in this post constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer by myself to buy or sell any securities or other financial instruments in this or in any other jurisdiction in which such solicitation or offer would be unlawful under the securities laws of such jurisdiction. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of any of the author’s employers.