Stop! Before You Launch an Initial Coin Offering, You Need to First Build a Community.

Author: Aj Agrawal / Source: Entrepreneur

Consumer communities built by Blockchain businesses can give novice consumers the resources they need. to connect to those already familiar with the product and concept

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

The blockchain world is, or at least once was, inherently exclusive. The reason is that, since blockchain’s inception, entrepreneurs, investors and consumers outside the development community have struggled to fully grasp just how big the prospect of a blockchain world is. Chalk that struggle up to the overshadowing of blockchain by Bitcoin and the persisting mythology around that currency.

In fact, it wasn’t until this past year that the world at large began to understand the potentially huge implications of blockchain, both financially and socially. Today, up-and-coming blockchain applications have an advantage that others who vied for initial coin offerings (ICOs) in the past lacked: recognion. People now realize that blockchain is the future, because the media keep telling them so.

Today, when those people see information swirling around yet another blockchain-based app, they are now more intrigued. Yet this surge of awareness is also a double-edged sword. Just because many people can now distinguish a decentralized ledger from a cryptocurrency doesn’t mean that the communal marketing efforts of blockchain developers and hubs have reached their peak — far from it.

An onslaught of condemnation

As blockchain gains more recognition and word-of-mouth momentum, some applications are also raising eyebrows.

Since the beginning of 2018, there has been an onslaught of condemnation against the various ICOs that are little more than scams. Investors, and the financial community at large, now want crypto applications to offer more than just hypotheses and white papers; they want proof of value for those applications.

While, in the long run, this trend will likely boost blockchain, by (hopefully) weeding out the scams from the viable applications, right now, it’s sparking mistrust of blockchain-based solutions in general.

For blockchain to really lead the type of global revolution its supporters want, the industry as a whole has to help people understand its…

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