Dear Crypto Advanced readers.
Let me take this opportunity to welcome you into our family of crypto investors, entrepreneurs, educators, and many more of our readers with different backgrounds who are interested to know the impact news can have in the crypto markets as well as on industries beyond them.
Today’s news lay down the ground work for potential great changes in the near future.
However, opinions that unlock the reasons behind the news are the keys to understanding the mechanics and guide you to take the right decisions. Crypto Advanced is all about opinions.
Major questions will be answered in our newsletter including; What is Blockchain? What is a cryptocurrency? Can I invest in Cryptocurrencies?What are stable coins? How Blockchain will affect my business?Which are the most promising blockchain companies?How do I spot a good investment opportunity in the blockchain and cryptocurrency world?How is the blockchain technology evolving?Who are the major players?How Central Banks will be reacting to the new world of cryptocurrencies?What is tokenization?Can I raise capital for my business through tokenization how can I trade cryptocurrencies and tokens?…and many more.
Thus, we decided to start with a boom!
“Facebook’s has recently announced a move into the cryptocurrencies through its own stable coin.”
What does it mean and why a giant like Facebook is interested in cryptocurrencies?Let us not waste time and start unlocking the value behind the news.
Hence, lets us focus on things that matter i.e.
- Who heads the initiative? Is there an elephant in the room?
David Marcus (former CEO and President of PayPal) is heading up the project. Marcus is an experienced entrepreneur and growth hacker. He started GTN Telecom, his first company, in 1996 in Geneva, Switzerland. GTN was acquired by World Access within four years – in 2000. That same year, he founded Echovox, a mobile media monetization company that helps large media companies connect with their mobile audiences. Zong, a division of Echovoxwas spun out to offer a mobile payments platform that lets customers pay for items online via direct billing to their mobile phone. When PayPal acquired Zong, Marcus became VP of mobile for the payments giant.
Marcus has a stellar record, he grew companies which later sold, he undertook growth roles and span out entities (a division of company that becomes an independent company in order to realize its hidden value) into standalone companies. He sat on the steering wheel of one of the largest and most prominent fintech companies PayPal.
We believe Facebook is putting a lot of importance in its cryptocurrency effort recognizing both its start-up role and its great potential as money making machine. We see the recent announcement as a positive move that can also impact the cryptocurrency ecosystem – commercial adoption of cryptocurrencies by major enterprises.
- What is FB’s micro-payment strategy for digital content distribution? Why is it important?
We believe Facebook is trying to help publishers monetize on users reacting on i.e. instant news appearing within Facebook’s environment. It could do that by turning them to subscribers for news organizations, by rendering the payment process frictionless i.e. reducing the commitment (making the purchase easy and providing immediate access).
Facebook users holding Facebook’s coins would be able to purchase content or subscribe to receive frequent content from selected publishers with one or two clicks — most likely without registering or paying in publishers registration pages. This could reduce the transaction time to just a few seconds and increases conversions significantly.
Facebook might offer its users an “electronic wallet” and prompted to top it up only when their online tab reaches at a specific amount i.e. $20.
We believe Facebook’s coins would contribute to the frictionless conversion of instant news readers to subscribers and thus generate greater revenues from news publishers advertising on Facebook’s platform. The company’s choice to adopt a stable coin approach confirms that stable coins would command the lion share of transactions in the future due to lower volatility.
- Why Facebook jumps into the fry of cryptocurrencies?
Facebook is attempting to reinvigorateit’s micro-payment strategy for digital content distribution. This is a step built on top of Facebook’s Credit operations, a business model that was in place in 2010-2012. Credits were points that you could buy with real money and that were stored with your Facebook account data. Something like virtual currency.You could use Credits to pay for stuff in Facebook apps, with Facebook taking 30% cut of the value of any transaction.The ambitious strategy was assuming that in the long run, you might be able to use Credits to buy things and services beyond Facebook, transforming Facebook to major player in electronic payments.
Facebook’s key asset is the hundreds of millions of people who are logged at any moment on its website, so if there were a “Pay with Facebook Coins” button on retailers’ web sites, or “Subscribe” on Facebook’s site for a news provider publication you could use that instead of reentering your data. Impulsive buying made frictionless.
Hence with previous knowledge of Credit the company is responding on news publishers’ feedback; that subscriptions were a top priority for their business, and that they wanted a way to encourage people to subscribe to their news outlets on Facebook, to bring out its stable coin.
Notable, Email Sign-Up and App Install buttons in Instant Articles had some but limited acceleration on subscriptions as they moved the potential subscriber from Facebook to the publishers’ website, and thus did not remove friction.
- What are the challenges?
- Is there a strong value prop to warranty widespreadusers’ adoption far and above what is available today in payments? and
- Can Facebook overcome consumers’ “trust issues – look though out 2018
We believe that frictionless transactions will increase conversions. Paying with tokens in platforms of the size that Facebook commands are a breakthrough, and thus we are skewed towards assigning a winning flag to Facebook’s initiative to adopt cryptocurrency payments through its stable tokens.
However, the trust issue is a much larger and complicated issue. It commands a continues commitment by Facebook to ensure privacy and security are in place. Adopting cryptocurrencies build on blockchain might provide some technological advantage due to the crypto nature of the blockchain which makes it much harder to hack. But this is less of a technology issue and more of a trust and commitment – Facebook lost more trust equity due to human/partner fault rather than inefficient technology.
- What could the value of the initiative be?
There is a wild guess as we are in the wild west era and stricking gold or oil could worth no less than a few dollars or a few millions of them. IN Facebook’s case,its coin could yield anywhere from $3 billion to $19 billion in additional revenue by 2021. To give the potential weight of this project we will compare it to the company’s total revenue of $40.6 billion in 2017, ($39.9 billion from advertising).
Worth mentioning that Facebook has been hiring on their cryptocurrency operations and more information can be found here;hiring, and has also acquired its first startup.
Dear subscribers,
Following Athanasios part it is now my turn to welcome you on board. As you can already see (read actually) we focus on the business side of the blockchain and we simplify the key points and pinpoint the road to the future.
From my side i will offer you my valuable experience gained from being just a reader of crypto news back in 2008 to entering the space as a user and retail investor in the summer of 2017 and finally becoming one of the few Strategists that created Fintech and Crypto services product concepts some of them you are already using!
The main driver to start this newsletter was the fact that if i relied on the available info sources from journalists that criticized Bitcoin and the rest of Altcoins and have not decided to just ignore them and dive in i would not have become who i am today
I have spent thousands of hours listening to Crypto influencers, reading newsletters and watching the prices every 60 seconds at Coinmarketcap. I made my 1st acquisitions during the summer of 2017, lived the Bitcoin fork, the rise of the ICO and the Fintech miracle of raising millions in seconds, the numerous thefts of other crypto enthusiasts that did not use a hardware wallet and how all exchanges went off line during January 2018 when things got heat up and hundreds of thousands of users did not manage to jump in. (now maybe this was for their best of luck..!)
So where are we now? Are we going to repeat the same mistakes and try to get rich by investing in the next small coin without research? Is the purpose to get rich and get a Lambo? Sorry my friends but this is not the case anymore.
There is one great fact that changed everything.
The Big Guys jumped in, manipulated the market, beat you up, brought prices to the bottom and took your coins for almost nothing. Why? Because you became greedy and panicked.
It is time to see the business opportunity of the Blockchain and together analyze the survivors and potential winners of the next bull run (if the raise comes this way and not gradually). It is also time to see how you can use the blockchain for your business. For this reason we have a special section the Blockchain Business section where every month i will analyze the Business Model of a successful/promising cryptocurrency. This will guide you on how to do the same for your company.
Furthermore (yes of course we have more) we are going to build together our crypto portfolio. All of our hours of work, analysis and time in the market will be used to present you with all the facts about our selected for analysis cryptocurrencies.
I am going to analyze one cryptocurrency in every newsletter, what happened so far and where it is going to go as a token and as a company as well.
So jump on board and lets enjoy the next phase of the Cryptocurrency world.
Let’s accept that we are not going to relive the crypto jungle of 2017 and as investors and entrepreneurs we will be wiser this time, use the blockchain for our business growth and invest in solid projects that address the real market.
Crypto Advanced will be your guide towards the future and together we will analyze the news, find out the next crypto champions and build blockchain business concepts that can help you create growth and wealth.
Welcome on board!
