We’re seeing a proliferation of speculation overclouding production. Most tokens start and end their lives on exchanges, where reality goes only as far as the hype. When forward-looking statements become the base mass of the ecosystem, and not enough projects actually make it to production to actually be of service to users, you indeed get an unhealthy ecosystem, and most projects are “sick” in this regard; most of them ultimately finding their demise from this condition.
We’re seeing many “base protocol” projects out there, but when they come to fruition, there’s either no viable tokenomics, or complete reliance on other developers or projects to take the protocol and “do something” with it. This is good for speculation because with protocols there are seemingly “endless” opportunities, so the hype bubble can grow much bigger and for a longer period of time. But in general this is like a growing credit-risk bubble in the eco-system, and a dangerous one at that, since it rewards dreams and dream weavers over execution. This holds special peril for long-term value generation in the crypto-verse. Other projects trying to actually develop applications, without solving the tough infrastructure challenges specific to their own domain, usually phase out since the base infra itself isn’t ready yet, and relying on other future “soon to work protocols” leaves these projects hung to dry.
Without touching base with true service, no true utility can arise, and without actual utility, no marketing efforts can ultimately sustain. Unfortunately, it’s a vicious cycle, as most early contribution to blockchain projects relies on marketing, and many of the projects then divert all their attention to marketing, ultimately starting and ending their path as a marketing campaign.
At 2key, we try to maintain a strict rule, where 2/3 of the company concentrate on building the thing, and the other 1/3 do the marketing and talk about the thing being built. We view this as a healthier mix of attention, and since the product we’re developing allows a new type of social p2p marketing, we consider this as a strategic trajectory to ultimately birth a healthier ecosystem not only for our own marketing, but for allowing any business result to be obtained via Social Sourcing, empowering and enriching the end users of the web for selectively relaying forward information.
Our rule of focusing most our attention and resources on actual Product & Engineering does mean that with each passing day we’re amassing actual assets, and striving forward to deliver on our promises. We’re currently actively developing 8 code repositories, have already written hundreds of thousands of code lines, and in advanced development of our webDapp, mobile Dapps (android/ios) and our no-Dapps (client-agnostic interfaces). We have a functioning POC and are now busy upgrading the coding structure and security of the underlying contracts and merging the code back to the webDapps and mobile Dapps.
2key is committed to not only develop a 2nd layer protocol fusing the Internet of information (HTTP) with the Internet of value (Smart Contracts), but also to deliver an end2end working Social Economic Network utilising this protocol, with actually viable tokenomics. To this end, we’ve developed the minimal viable 2key protocol implementation, supporting the use case of multi-step referral contracts. Knowing how to balance strategic R&D with tactic MVP delivery is always important in hi-tech startups (speaking from past experience of building the core technology for 3 successful companies), but in today’s crypto realm it’s even more so, since some of the base infra itself is missing, and you need to by very dynamic in fixing exactly how much and where to innovate, from protocol, to infra, to algorithms, to UXI, in order to get a successful, actually working production environment off the ground — which actually brings value and service to end users.
At 2key, we’ve chosen the use case of multi-step referrals as a base for our consumer-facing product, since it has astounding implications; Just think about it: Our brains produce our minds out of a p2p multi-step referral network between neurons, while other complex distributed networks in nature (e.g. ant colonies, bee hives, bacterial colonies) capitalise on p2p multi-step information relay biotechnology to enable emergence of network-wide phenomena and adaptability.
As was proven for the human network as well, especially via the DARPA red balloon challenge (see our full incentive model for a more detailed explanation), we’ve realised that multi-step tracking and the right incentive model can allow the human network to exhibit incredible emergent phenomena. Meanwhile, seeing Facebook generate tens of billions of dollars in yearly revenue from the service of finding target audiences for various business results, we’ve recognised that robotic advertisement platforms use humans both as input and output, ingesting all the profits in the middle. Now seeing as the human web is so inter-connected as it is, we’ve recognised it’s actually possible to migrate the profits of robotic advertising back to the people, by allowing the human web to converge on target audiences in a result-driven manner using multi-step link sharing, and incentivising efficient convergence on each campaign with social and economic capital. We want to cut the central targeting robots of Google and Facebook out of the game, and redistribute their earnings to the masses. We want to make the web proactive again by rewarding social networking in a result-driven manner.
The human web will be able to close in on any target audience much more efficiently than any robot, providing multi-step referrals and smart contracts can be integrated into HTTP, so that these campaigns can be easily generated and acted upon online using only internet browsers/clients as distributed nodes and link sharing as a means to advance contract states.
So we’re working hard and excited to start delivering usable, zero-integration solutions allowing anyone to generate and run multi-step referral contracts with nothing but an internet browser and link sharing: A first, working, scalable implementation of Smart Contracts over HTTP.
Going forward, we’ll be able to generalise the 2key protocol to interface with more smart contract blockchains, and to facilitate not only Social Sourcing contracts, but other forms of Smart Contracts as well. Our vision is to ultimately empower everyday users to generate and run any smart contract just as easy as sending, receiving and reading messages online, using HTTP as a web-wide state transducer, and the main blockchains only for persisting the contract at generation and at final resolution.
To summarise, we have a clear vision and mission regarding protocol, infrastructure, algorithms and product, and we have a rather clear vision as to how deeply to advance in each vertical to get a working beta off the ground — an MVP for running Social Sourcing contracts (multi-step referral campaigns, starting with Campaigns for Presell Acquisition of Cryptocurrencies). We’re concentrated on delivering a working webDapp and mobile Dapps to enable the use-case of Social Sourcing over 2key’s protocol.
A final quick word about the importance of an actual product serving users for viable tokenomics and long term success of the project: 2key’s Social Sourcing Network defines a verily viable tokenomics model, which is crucial for any blockchain project; You can’t invent the web of value without a clear value generation model. If you think about Ethereum itself, the protocols behind the scenes are nice, but if they weren’t developed into an actual distributed virtual machine with at least one production use case (mainly token sales and economy balances management), the ETH tokens underlying the project would not have become so valuable, and would not have allowed the project to continue and develop the low level protocols enabling the EVM to further evolve.
The beautiful promise of cryptocurrencies is still there. Applicative layers in the web can now be self-sustainable financially, and become sovereign economies (as long as they actually deliver a usable product with viable tokenomics). Optimising an economy which utilises a geo-bound coin (fiat), is hard to do. When you have a single coin catering every type of transaction and utility, and a central bank that is neither for the people or by the people, it becomes very hard to optimise any fiat (i.e. national) economy to benefit the geography it is supposedly serving. Today’s fiat economies do serve their heavy stakers (and self-minting entities (banks)) quite well, but the general public is usually left mostly out of gardens of abundance. However, the internet is gradually becoming more borderless, and less geo-restricted, and having the ability now to optimise utility layers of the web with their own tokens has the potential to actually allow optimisation of each such layer, as it has its own token serving only its specific utility. In 2key’s roadmap there’s a special place for Tokenomics AI, since we see the feasibility of monitoring 2key.network viability KPIs, then allowing Machine Learning models to optimise these KPIs by controlling some financial levers (e.g. how many tokens to distribute each month in the periodic Network Reputation Rewards). Part of what we’re building for in Tokenomics AI is towards this end, to make sure 2KEY holders can enjoy a viable continually optimised economic network.
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