DISCLAIMER: I am not a financial advisor. All contents on this blog are solely my own personal views and for Cryptocurrency Trading education/entertainment purposes only. Cryptocurrency Trading is very risky. Losses can exceed deposits. Enter with discretion.
For most average people, especially now at this very times of a corona virus pandemic, this one question is ringing on their minds:
What is cryptocurrency?
Cryptocurrency is a currency powered by Blockchain and protected by the power of advanced ‘Cryptography’ which ensures that you don’t need a central authority to protect the value and authenticity of a payment system. It offers anonymity as well plus a secured transaction of a no way to be hacked or duped.
Some of its ideas are the removal for the need of third party allowing peer-to-peer transactions, giving financial opportunity and power to the unbanked people even to the most remote places on Earth mentioning the poorest continents including Africa. For someone to gain access over cryptocurrencies, they just need electricity, a device as simple as a mobile phone and the internet of course.
I know for sure that one of Satoshi Nakamoto's original goals of inventing the Bitcoin is to bring back to people the power over the broken financial system which he oversaw during the 2008 Financial Crisis.
Unlike traditional payments like Dollar, rupee , pound or naira which need banks to transfer payments, cryptocurrencies rely on “blockchain and internet” to power them.
Even though Cryptocurrencies do not need banks to run them , the payments on crypto are in fact more secure than traditional payment systems like banks (which suffer from glitches occasionally) owing to the power of blockchain.
The main super power of Cryptocurrency is its ability to work seamlessly across different borders just like the internet with almost no regulation possible by governments' intervention.
This means for the first time in the history of mankind , Money can be transmitted for very long distances for near zero cost without any hassles.
Bitcoin started more than a decade ago and has risen to more than 250 billion in market capitalization Experts predict in next 10 years that cryptocurrencies overall market cap will reach a value of over 2 trillion which arguably will be the ‘Crypto gold rush’ that everybody would not dare to miss. In fact, it is happening now. The fear-of-missing-out or simply FOMO is real and right in front of us.
Potential of Crypto
The invention of blockchain-based cryptocurrency is one of the greatest technological leaps in human history. Unfortunately crypto adoption is very low right now which is approximately less than 0.10% of total world's population.
The reason is simple, so far crypto could only be acquired through Mining or through Initial Coin Offering - ICO, both of which need high technical knowledge and investment which average users stay away from. There are other methods of acquiring cryptocurrencies like the famous Proof-of-Stake protocol or POS which is extremely famous in DeFi or Decentralized Finance applications.
A super simple on-boarding with an incentive in the form airdrop creates motivation for average users to sign up and refer their friends.
One thing is very clear, cryptocurrency airdrops are one of the paths for mass adoption. It can be done for free. Of course airdrops usually made for free. Every cryptocurrency born starts with nothing or 0 value like Bitcoin's beginnings. Look at it now.
Did Facebook acquire billions of users if they asked to pay to sign up? Though I know for a fact that they made revenues through Data selling and Advertising, it cannot be denied that the infamous social media giant is topping the industry it belongs to.
Every payment network like Paypal and the rest alike spent billions of dollars for attracting initial 100 million users, however the initial users didn't get a share of their massive success.
What is a Cryptocurrency Airdrop?
A cryptocurrency airdrop is an event wherein initial tokens are offered for free via participating platforms. It always follows rules and conditions depending on the type of cryptocurrencies that the airdrop is offered to. An airdrop can happen once or many times on a single participating cryptocurrency. Other times airdrop occurs during a cryptocurrency fork.
A simplified Airdrop model to the rescue
A change to an airdrop mechanism that is simple to understand or execute should attract the average Joes who sees cryptocurrency for the first time . I assume average people are less techy and savvy. If everyone who participates in the initial success of airdrop gets rewarded handsomely as the amount of airdrop given keeps decreasing with more people joining and with increasing prices.
Fixing the cryptocurrency adoption problem starts with making ‘acquiring and earning cryptocurrency’ easy enough for the average person to participate in cryptos.
The problems with the most current airdrops mechanism are that they expect you to:
• Produce strict KYC documents like Passport, Driving license etc...
• Share or like multiple social media handles
• Expect you to wait a few days for you to receive your airdrop bounty
• Limit the numbers of user participation to first 10,000 users or 25,000 users.
Simplicity is a super power
An airdrop believes in KISS ‘Keep It Simple Stupid’.
With a simplified airdrop however users can claim their airdrop by simply signing up with email which means:
• No KYC documents like passports etc to be shared
• No social media profiles to be liked of shared
• No waiting for getting your airdrop as its instant
• No limit on user participation as we want to onboard billion users
People may able to achieve this by using a cutting edge AI-driven identity engine which ensures one person can only use one email to claim an airdrop and stop fraudsters who create multiple emails to claim this airdrop. Avoiding the abuse and stopping the greedy ones.
The power of a simplified airdrop will drive mass adoption to average people as well as educating them about the whats, hows and whys of cryptocurrencies.
For the time being we can only wait for the cryptocurrency to fully boom and bloom.
I do hope you have enjoyed reading this article and gain new learning from it.
Feel free to shoot me any comments down below. I definitely love to hear from you!
Have a great day ahead. Stay safe and God bless you always. :-)
I agree that simplicity is the most important factor in encouraging cryptocurrency adoption. But I am not sure that airdrops are the right mechanism. I prefer the approach taken by Brave or Presearch, where coins can be earned just by using an everyday product (a web browser, a search engine and so on). This also avoids the need for KYC, certainly initially.