The rise of Blockchain

With billions of investments being pumped in the blockchain industry, it seems to be growing rapidly day-by-day and is expanding on to new horizons.

Those horizons include humanitarian causes, such as combating child trafficking or introducing cheaper electricity. Others focus solely on the creation of cryptocurrencies, while some deal with copyright protection. The innovation seems to be never-ending.

One of these innovations comes to you from Decentraland, the company that shocked us all when in 2017 it attracted investments in the amount of $26 million in just 30 seconds, The New York Times writes.

Your Own Virtual Estate

Their invention seems as though it came out of an advanced combination of a sci-fi movie and a simulation game. Specifically, Decentraland has designed a virtual reality platform powered by the Ethereum blockchain. This platform offers you a chance to utilize blockchain technology to immerse yourself entirely in a 3D interactive world by owning a piece of the virtual estate. Amazing, isn’t it?

What a time to be alive. In essence, you can now purchase virtual estate online at the prices that reach up to $120,000. This amount might buy you a meager piece of virtual land, a space of 10m2. This estate is located in a virtual neighborhood in a virtual city. Similar to the real world, the prices of certain properties depend on multiple factors, and consequently, the estate in specific neighborhoods is more valuable than in others.

Virtual reality that is courtesy of blockchain saw the light of day at an advertisers gathering in Cannes, France in June, including a “blockchain yacht” and a “blockchain villa”. Let’s not forget that there was also a “blockchain lounge” in Davos, Switzerland.

Blockchain Receives Billions of Dollars in Investments

A number of investors have already gotten on the bandwagon that is blockchain. These include the people behind Andreessen Horowitz, a technology giant co-founded by Marc Andreessen, the inventor of the modern Web browser.

The company announced it is establishing a $300 million cryptocurrency fund that will focus solely on investments in blockchain technologies.

Andreessen has likened the current developments in the field of blockchain to those at the turn of the century in the field of the Internet, in other words, the period of the so-called information technology bubble and excessive speculation, the period marked by an extraordinary increase in the usage and adaptation of the Internet.

That period was a time of hardening and the sink-or-swim situations that gave us a number of giants that we have today, such as eBay and Amazon. However, there were countless of those that no-one remembers anymore, those that experienced a short-lived success, only to die soon after, such as Pets.com.

“For those of us who have been involved in software for a long time, it feels like the early days of the internet, web 2.0, or smartphones all over again,” Andreessen and his colleagues said when introducing the fund, called “a16z crypto”.

Like Google Docs, blockchain technology creates a secure list of all changes made to the “document” and records who made those changes. At the same time, every entity in the chain who made any changes is trusted and receives a copy of all the changes.

The blockchain industry will undergo the same experience that the Internet industry had gone through at the end of the 1990s. Some will crash, others will survive, coming out of the dark stronger. What will certainly come out stronger, is blockchain.

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