The post originally appeared on Medium and we republished with permission from its author, Paul Rajchgod.
There have been many ‘great debates’ in the BSV community—some historic and now settled, others still raging. I’d like to touch on one that I think is interesting and certainly worthy of some analysis, but at the same time, is being overly simplified, in my opinion.
What is this great debate? It is ‘enterprise vs. consumer adoption’ of BSV. Which will be the driving force? Is one more important than the other?
It doesn’t take many scratches at the surface to see that like so many things in life, this too is nuanced. If you look at many of the enterprises, apps, wallets, projects, etc. building and working on the BSV blockchain today, one business you might think of as consumer-facing is actually, at heart, for enterprises, and another enterprise platform is ultimately designed for consumers.
Night is Day! Up is Down!
Let’s talk about TonicPow, the peer-to-peer digital advertising system that uses the BSV blockchain. Individuals can earn Bitcoin for promoting products and services they like to their social media followers, and businesses use TonicPow’s tools to create flexible, incentive-based ad campaigns. In all cases, Bitcoin micro-transactions sit in the middle, so as TonicPow usage grows, so will consumer and enterprise adoption.
What about EHR Data, the U.S.-based healthcare platform that announced a few months ago it had chosen the BSV blockchain for its game-changing offering (and who wasn’t excited to see the potential addition of billions of transactions on-chain annually from this one enterprise??)? The much-anticipated project will be the first healthcare platform that, as their website states, “…incentivizes patients to share their personal health data with their healthcare providers” and “…is designed for patients to authorize which healthcare providers and research facilities can access and/or add to their Electronic Health Record in real-time.” Sounds like it might be responsible for a lot of BSV consumer adoption to me!
And Norway-based UNISOT? They recently announced pilot programs with several customers in the seafood industry with partner SeafoodChain, built on UNISOT’s ‘Enterprise Blockchain Platform’. Sounds pretty darn ‘enterprisey’, right? As CoinGeek reported on July 2, 2020, SeafoodChain “…allows every actor along the supply chain, right through to end consumers, to trace the origins of their product by simply scanning a QR code.” UNISOT CEO Stephan Nilsson says the company is developing two apps — one for commercial use and one for retail use. As UNISOT’s press release on the pilot states, “the end consumer is the most important actor in the seafood supply chain”. So is this enterprise or consumer adoption of BSV? or Both?
Does anything change with the coming proliferation of tokenization and smart contracts, now underway on BSV? I don’t think so. Many of the projects building on BSV will be using smart contracts and tokenization as part of their apps and platforms, which, again, are designed for either consumers, or enterprises, or as is often the case, both!
Speaking of smart contracts, what about sCrypt, the programming platform for software developers to more easily write and run smart contracts on BSV? sCrypt helps developers create offerings that ultimately use Bitcoin as much more than the money transfer system or store-of-value that a lot of people focus on.
As founder and CEO Xiaohui Liu recently told CoinGeek, “we have already seen a plethora of novel contracts developed in a short time using sCrypt”, citing examples including “an insurance contract that hedges farmers against bad weather”, and “an inheritance contract that automatically transfers Bitcoins to beneficiaries after the creator’s passing.” I see Bitcoin transactions generated by enterprises and consumers from these scenarios.
Even some of the BSV wallets, who many of us would think of as strictly consumer-focused, have turned their attention to enterprise customers as well, such as with HandCash’s offering called HandCash Connect. As their website states, “…we’ve drastically simplified how BitCoin apps are built with our new all-in-one BitCoin SDK, HandCash Connect. Launch sooner, iterate faster and build more freely!”
So…enterprises or consumers? Who will be the driving force of BSV transactions and adoption? YES.
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