Dear Readers,
Growth is fundamental to the long-term survival and development of cryptocurrencies and their underlying blockchains. In simple terms, a cryptocurrency grows as more people use it. But even more important to the growth of a cryptocurrency is that the number of committed long-term users and hodlers continues to grow from cycle to cycle. After all, demand is the primary driver of value accretion in every market and no one drives demand like a cryptocurrency’s devotees.
It should come as no surprise then, that cryptocurrencies often find themselves at odds with one another in their quest to grow. The cryptocurrency space has been rife with debate and intrigue since its earliest days. It’s common for cryptocurrencies and protocols to outright copy one another in order to steal the predecessor’s user base rather than starting from scratch when building a community. As an example, the Shiba Inu cryptocurrency was created as a “Dogecoin” killer and has as its mascot the same Doge-based meme that made the rounds on the internet in the early 2010s. And who can forget the PancakeSwap Decentralized Exchange (DEX) on the Binance Smart Chain that is a literal clone of the Ethereum-based Uniswap DEX?
While many debates in the space can seem relatively lighthearted, many devolve into a make-or-break fight for survival. The block wars that culminated in 2017 provide a prime example in that the two combatants, Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, have followed extraordinarily different paths in the time since. The price of the winner, Bitcoin, is up over 2000% since 2017 and it has been adopted by corporations, nations, and millions of users around the world. Bitcoin Cash’s price meanwhile sits a mere 12% higher than its price at creation as of this writing.
Another all-out brawl has been shaping up for months and will likely dominate cryptocurrency conversations for many years to come: Proof-of-Work vs. Proof-of-Stake.
