Published
5 years ago on
August 23, 2018
“A working product is active and available to the public. Its mainnet has likely been released for some time, bumping the version numbers well above 1.0. Businesses and individuals use it on a daily basis for dapps, smart contracts, or digital currency transactions. In other words, the mere existence of a product does not necessarily mean that the product is working. After all, is a foundation really doing any work when there is no weight on top of it?”Moreover:
“Likewise, a dapp platform that has a mainnet but that doesn’t have any noteworthy dapps on top of it isn’t considered working by this criteria.”You might look at this and wonder why TRON and EOS (among others) are left out of this, this is because they have recently launched their own mainnets, so don’t yet meet the criteria defined by the study. Let’s explore some of Bardinelli and Frumkin’s justificationsIt’s no surprise Bitcoin tops this list as Bitcoin has demonstrated on a number of occasions that is is a working product, according to the study:
“Today, Bitcoin is being used for peer-to-peer payments across the globe. More than that, though, it is leading the way towards a future in which financial technology is trustless, secure, resilient, and censorship resistant. Without Bitcoin, this list would not exist.”A surprise comes in the form of Monero, a crypto project that has, until recently been riddled with news of fraud and hacks, either way, privacy is an important part of the final working product:
“Most cryptocurrencies offer little in the form of anonymity. Monero was built for privacy from the ground-up, featuring stealth addresses, ring signatures, and complete coin fungibility. All of this adds up to a near-perfect cloak of anonymity, allowing Monero users to conduct transactions without exposing their identity. Monero has had steady growth over the years thanks to a dedicated team of developers and an active community. The project continues to evolve with new privacy features and improved transaction security.”Finally, Basic Attention Token. According to the research, this was very easy to include in the list as it is a function product, complimented by a working application too, Brave:
“Not only is Brave Browser functional, it’s the only browser on the market that has built-in ad-blocking and tracker blocking, making the browsing experience both cleaner and faster than what you get with other popular browsers like Chrome and Firefox. The future remains uncertain for the BAT token itself, as its adoption depends heavily on whether or not advertisers buy-in to the Brave model, as well as how willing Brave users are to be shown relevant ads and to pass along the BAT they earn to content publishers.”Take a look at the full report, it reveals some interesting justifications and moreover, highlights important considerations that can be made when trawling through the top-100 to locate your next investment opportunity. As stated, this isn’t investment advice, but it does exist as a benchmark for some aspects of cryptocurrency investment.Next time you want to buy into a project, ask yourself, what is its use value? How will it grow? Is it or does it have a working product? Investment Disclaimer
