Yumerium is building a crypto layer for online gaming. This would help new games and game developers easily add a layer of crypto in their existing games, and also simultaneously be a part of an ecosystem.

The idea is that Yumerium builds a crypto token, called YUM, which can then be integrated by existing online games into their products. This is easier when the game is being developed, but developers can also do this integration after the fact, i.e. after the game has already been developed.

Advantages of Yumerium

So why should online games add Yumerium? There are many reasons for this. Firstly, games can use the YUM token to create incentive structures for influencers. This will help them reach a wider audience than without their help. They can also pay people in YUM to play their games and share it with their friends, thus helping the peer to peer aspect of gaming and marketing. They can also pay people to write about their experience, thus reaching out to the broader gaming community.

But why use YUM for this? The answer lies in the network. If Yumerium can create a thriving ecosystem of players, developers, and influencers, then YUM becomes valuable. This is because you have access to this network. It is no longer just a payment means now.

Game development is a competitive endeavor, and therefore developers look for an edge to promote their game. A crypto layer is another advantage for the game. Gamers can pay in crypto, i.e. YUM token for in-game items. This is a huge revenue source for games already.

New Market Potential

The idea behind Yumerium is that of a network. The network, powered by YUM, could do better than an individual game can. If this proves to be true, what Yumerium is building can become very valuable for game developers.

In addition, don’t forget the new frontiers. We already know that crypto is heavily dominated by the young people i.e. Millennials and Gen-Zers. This is also the prime demographic for crypto. Therefore, gaming and crypto can easily benefit each other. New games can appeal to the crypto community specifically. This is beneficial because the crypto community tends to have money to spend for in-game assets as well. If you don’t believe me, check out the prices of digital cats on Crypto Kitties!

Yumerium plans to build a network of games that can collectively benefit each other just as networks tend to do. Gamers can explore new games, write about them, and share with their friends and get rewarded for it. New games have a community to build into.

To learn more, check out the Yumerium website. They are doing an ICO, so if you  want to invest, be sure to read the whitepaper and understand that investing in token sales can be very risky.

Photo Credit: xmodulo

We are generally interested in niche applications for crypto. This is the best way to capture the market, after all. Get the first initial users who are passionate about the product and also see great value. Then expand beyond the initial use case. This is the tried and true model for startups, and should be adopted more by blockchain/crypto startups too.

Today, let’s look at one such company – Wemark. It is a project in a very specific niche – photo licensing. And that industry could definitely use some new technological disruption. After all, photographers hardly made a third of the revenue these companies generate! It is a huge oligopoly because it is a two-sided marketplace. The big ones – Shutterstock and Getty Images, have cornered the market for paying clients, so photographers are left with no choice but to play ball and go with whatever they offer.

There are all sorts of competitors in the space, as is expected, given these profit margins. However, none has succeed in replacing these behemoths. Could a crypto startup do it?

Wemark provides 85% of the revenue to the photographers. That’s around 3 times what they can share with the larger companies. The sell for photographers is a no-brainer. The biggest question is, will Wemark be able to attract the commercial deals that these large companies specialize in? We’ll have to wait and see how that turns out, since it is only now beginning to operate and offer photos to such clients.

Wemark offers payments to photographers in its own native token, which may be an issue for more mainstream photographers down the line since it would be harder to convert into fiat, but as a first step in acquisition, it should be manageable or the company itself can run some sort of informal exchange for the photographers.

We originally talked about dominating one industry and then going on from there. If Wemark is successful in the photography business and can actually provide value to both sides of the marketplace and more importantly actually see parties on both sides of the marketplace, then there is no reason why it cannot go beyond. The company already plans to enter the digital asset space using a similar model. This can be anything – doesn’t need to be photos, after all.

How the company performs in the photography market remains to be seen. The company also needs to provide value and utility to its native token, since that is what is being used for payments, and shouldn’t have too high of a velocity, which would cause the market cap to remain small.

Overall, the photo licensing industry is one that is definitely in need for some disruption. Wemark approaches this using a crypto token for payments and providing a higher percentage of payment to photographers. Whether these are enough to attract buyers remains to be seen.

To learn more, check out the Wemark website and whitepaper.

Photo Credit: Jonathan Kennedy

Essentia is one of those projects that benefits the entire crypto ecosystem if it were to succeed in its mission. In fact, not just crypto specifically, but the entire ‘decentralized web’. Today more than ever, the importance of a decentralized web cannot be overstated. We should do everything in our power to make the move away from centralized behemoths – the Facebooks of the world, towards a decentralized web where users are in control – the Blockstacks of the world.

Problem of ‘Too Much’

So where does Essentia fit into this picture? On the user and adoption side. To start off, just think of just the crypto-asset space, i.e. your favorite tokens. If you were to hold the keys, which is how you should do crypto, how many wallets do you need to download? What if a new crypto interests you? Is each of them secure enough to download on your own computer? What a user experience nightmare! No wonder people just don’t bother and leave their coins on an exchange, which has been a terrible idea throughout the short history of this industry.

To be sure, this is a big problem. People who are new to crypto for example cannot be expected to download a hundred wallets and store them safely on their computers with appropriate backups. It is just not feasible for mass adoption.

The Essentia Solution

Now, what something like Essentia does is still let the user be in charge of all the crypto, data, apps, etc. but through a single master seed. Everything else flows deterministically from this seed. The user has the seed and keeps that one single seed secure and backed up. This would automatically keep everything else the user does secure and backed up as well. No need to trust a third-party to manage keys or data anymore.

Already, Essentia has integrated several of the most prominent crypto-assets and crypto-applications into its platform, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, IPFS, Status, Gnosis, etc. This means that a user who wants to transact in Bitcoin, pay for a DApp in Ether, store some data in IPFS and participate in some prediction markets can do all of that via a single entry point through Essentia.

This is a powerful way to interact with this new and emerging decentralized web, because the user doesn’t need to follow every single isolated app in isolation. Instead, for the user, they can just log into their Essentia, with their ID, and everything else just flows naturally from there. It brings down the user experience gap between centralized and decentralized applications.

If you’re interested to learn more, check out the Essentia website and their whitepaper.

Photo Credit: Georgie Pauwels

The travel agent business model is a strange one for the newer millennial and Gen-Z audience. They are used to doing everything by themselves on the internet. Travel agents, to this generation, sounds really anarchic. Why would they need one?

Actually, there are many advantages of having a travel agent arrange your trip. They know more about the local on the ground conditions to where you’re traveling better than you. It is true that services like TripAdvisor and AirBnB are second nature to the younger generations. Still, in a new city, especially a new country, there are enough differences than someone more experienced than just reading words online can provide better on-the-ground intelligence towards local norms, traditions, and customs.

The newer generations then have a dilemma. They never really feel the need for a travel agent, since they are happy using the online tools that they have. However, it would still be nice to have the ability of a travel agent when it comes to on-ground intelligence.

Enter Cool Cousin

Cool Cousin is a new take on the travel agent market. Why go to a boring stodgy travel agent when you can find a cheery next door neighbor when you visit? That’s the premise of Cool Cousin. Instead of going to a brick and mortar agent and get charged a lot of fees, how about just connect people locally in the area with visitors? Thus the name – it is like having a cool cousin living in the city you visit!

The idea of Cool Cousin is a natural extension of the ‘sharing economy’ that became popular in the US and elsewhere after the financial crash of 2008-09. This period gave us companies like Airbnb and Uber that brought together two sides of a marketplace on a single platform. The users have complete freedom and flexibility of work, including whether to accept a gig or when to be available for one.

Peer to Peer Meets Crypto

Cool Cousin is already an app that is for the peer to peer economy, and is being used today. Therefore the company already has a big set of users that use the platform today for finding that perfect peer to peer travel agent on the ground in their travel market.

Imagine, however, how much move powerful this can be if it also incorporates a crypto token for payments. In fact, the token lets you do much more, and in a way ‘drives’ the users of the platform towards certain tasks. The token is also used to incentivize user behavior.

With the rise of crypto, it is only natural to see the ‘sharing’ economy mix with peer to peer currencies, i.e. cryptocurrencies. We are seeing a rise in number of tokens that facilitate such behavior and allow platforms to scale.

Cool Cousin is, in a nutshell, using crypto to advance the usage in the travel industry.

If you’re interested in learning more, make sure to check out the website and read the whitepaper. It also has a token sale, but please note that investing in token sales in extremely risky and you can lose all your money. Never invest even a penny more than you can afford to lose.

Photo Credit: PictureKat

Since the very first days of Bitcoin being released to the world, a few people saw the fundamental potential of such a technology. To them, Bitcoin was less about just money and more about sovereignty, but in the context of money.

For almost a hundred years, money has been in the control of governments. Governments declare what is legal tender, and how you can pay your taxes, i.e. in fiat money ordained by the government. No longer was money the realm of free markets where traders, buyers, and sellers come to an agreement on how to transact. It was instead a tool of the government.

Bitcoin changed all that. For the first time ever, it was possible to create completely digital money that can be transferred between parties without a central intermediary sitting between the parties. This works even if the network is made up of distrusting parties – all parties will trust the ledger that is decentralized.

This already had profound implications for self-sovereignty in general. After all, the ability to trade and exchange value with other humans is so fundamental to our being and survival that it is hard not to say that he who controls this process of exchange wields an ungodly power over us. Bitcoin was created to reduce this centralized power.

The ideas that Bitcoin unleashed cannot be put back into the bottle. Bitcoin was just the beginning, with the decentralization of money. What if we could follow along these footsteps to remove other central powers of government? What if, in the ideal, there was an overarching voluntary network that did most of everything we use the government for? A decentralized nation state, so to speak.

Enter Bitnation. That’s exactly what the goals of this highly ambitious blockchain project are. In addition, as opposed to most other projects out there, the Bitnation project tries to keep as close as possible to the original decentralization roots of Bitcoin, which founded the whole space.

Bitnation aims to create a ‘decentralized national passport’ to begin with, by abiding by its constitution. To be clear, this doesn’t have any legal jurisdiction per se. The whole idea is to create a voluntary organization that people are free to join only if they agree with the goals and aims of the group. If not, they are free to abstain.

Dispute resolution is primarily handled through reputation inside the network as opposed to the legal system – again, a case of decentralization coming first as opposed to central institutions and organizations.

Is such an entity even possible? It is a very ambitious project, so we’ll need to wait and see how it develops. If you want to participate, there is a token sale going on. Check out the website and whitepaper. If you invest in the token sale, be absolutely sure you’re only putting in what you can afford to lose – token sales are highly risky and you can lose all your money.

Photo Credit: robin

Blockchains are powerful self-contained economic systems that, by creating the right incentive structures, can make a set of distrusting parties come to a consensus. They are self-contained in that all the information that the participants come to an agreement towards, is all contained inside the blockchain. This keeps the system secure, but also limits its usage. For example, the Bitcoin blockchain doesn’t know about the outside world – say whether the S&P 500 is up or down for the day, or how the USD/JPY market is moving. It doesn’t even know a lot about its own market, i.e. the BTC network nodes don’t know, for example, the price of BTC/USD.

This secure but self-contained aspect of blockchains make their use limited when it comes to the real world. Bitcoin, for example, is only pitched as a store of value and means of payment, not beyond that. However, as we enter the 10th year of blockchains in the real world, we are seeing more and more projects try and tackle this problem of getting real-world information into the blockchain. The XYO Network may very well be one of the most ambitious projects out there.

Real World Location on Blockchain

The XYO Network creates a way to encode real-world information on to the blockchain, which can then be used by other applications. Since XYO is built on Ethereum, other Ethereum projects can use its specialized ‘Proof of Location’ protocol for their own purposes, by integrating with the XYO network.

Why is this important? Think about the implications for a moment. The blockchain, a decentralized and trustless economic machine, can now know about a person or thing’s location. This is powerful, in everything from in-person discounts to drones navigating their way in space by creating a microtransaction to other drones to get out of their way, so they can reach their destination faster.

The application potential of such a universal proof of location protocol are endless. Of course, like with any startup, there is a probability of failure, but the ideas behind a proof of location protocol on the blockchain are especially appealing and powerful.

Actually Deployed Beacons

There are several upcoming projects that are also working on a type of location on the blockchain. However, one thing that the XYO Network has going for it is that it already has a lot of deployed beacons in the wild. In the real world – today. This isn’t vaporware.

These beacons are the ones that measure and transmit the location of objects or people, and their deployment is going to be critical for such a project to succeed. In fact, the proof of location protocol that becomes the de-facto standard will be the one that is able to deploy the most number of beacons, because that’s what gives trust and real-world applicability as opposed to some theoretical musings alone.

The XYO network would actually work as a complement to existing GPS system that is so commonly used for navigation. It will also be more trustless than GPS, since it is on the blockchain and not controlled by one agent like the US government. This may not be a problem in most cases, but in the 1% cases where it is, XYO network can act as a supplement to GPS.

If you’re interested to learn more, check out the XYO network site and the whitepaper to learn more. Make sure you’ve read the documents very carefully if you’re considering investing in the token sale. Remember that investing in token sales is very risky and you can lose all your money. Never invest more than you’re willing to lose in token sales.

Today, we want to take a look at the possible ways to fund the upcoming internet of things revolution. This is a long-term play. Just like the internet took over 30 years before the world wide web really came along, so will the IoT world. The idea has been with us for decades now. However, for such a broad sweeping technology, everything else needs to be in place before it can truly penetrate our society. This is why our world is not unrecognizable today with the advent of IoT.

However, we know that the IoT revolution is coming. You can be a company in New York and get instantaneous weather data in Sydney. The power of this data can be huge. You can know the local conditions, traffic, preferences, etc. everything in real time around the world. It can potentially transform most aspects of human society.

Why is it not here yet? It is mostly because there are other technologies that need to ‘be there’ first before the IoT revolution can take off. Take internet connectivity for example. For an IoT to work, it needs access to high quality, high availability and high bandwidth internet connection. The whole world is just not there yet. Also, bandwidth and storage can be expensive still in many parts of the world, especially for large data transfers that are needed for the IoT revolution.

Then of course, the big challenge is the creation of the sensor itself. This is very subjective because it depends on the type of sensor. There are supplemental technologies like self-driving cars that are making the cost of manufacturing certain types of sensors go down over an exponential curve.

Still, the actual sensors themselves are no trivial engineering problem. After all, you need to ship millions to billions of such sensors, all collecting data and connected to the internet. That’s an immense amount of data that is being collected.

What’s the incentive for deploying these sensors? Right now, it is direct economic incentive, i.e. if Google’s self driving car needs weather conditions on a road, Google will deploy a sensor at that location. However, at scale, this is not a replicable strategy. There are just too many areas around the world to cover.

That’s where Databroker DAO comes it. It is building a decentralized marketplace for data from these IoT sensors. All kinds of buyers and sellers can get together on this marketplace and transact to get the data. So now, instead of companies deploying one sensor, they can effectively ‘rent’ thousands of sensors and get a better picture of the data on the ground, in real time.

Also, the problem of who will deploy the sensors becomes easier – if you think you can make more money via selling the data that the sensor collects, you may as well! Therefore, you don’t need to depend on large corporations. Instead, buy a sensor, deploy it to the network, and get paid for the data collected.

If this idea seems interesting, check out the databroker DAO website and the whitepaper.

Photo Credit: Nathan Chantrell