That’s what we took away from a fireside chat that Brad Burnham conducted with Peter and me at Union Square Ventures’ office this week. The room was mostly comprised of startup employees from USV portfolio companies that don’t have anything to do with blockchain, but know that something important is happening with this technology and wanted to learn more.
Through the evening we covered a broad range of topics: tokenized crowdfunds and our views on the appropriate way to build those from a regulatory perspective, the new things that the novel features of cryptocurrencies such as micropayments and multi-sig transactions make possible, what decentralized trusted computing platforms (such as Ethereum) are, and the importance of permissionless, open blockchain networks.
It was clear that the animated audience was thinking through how to best apply these technologies to their current and future projects. There was particular interest in tokenized crowdfunding and what this phenomenon means for startups. Could this technology totally change the relationship between investors and businesses? Or businesses and their customers? Will developing open platforms become more economically feasible than it has been traditionally? As more and more entrepreneurial minds begin exploring applications of open blockchains, we’ll soon find out.