Those crypto rising stars that fell in the bear market

New projects emerge in the blockchain industry one after another. Although it is a vast ocean, only a few projects succeed. Most of the projects that were once very popular have now become a small wave in the ocean after the heat faded. But even if they fail, they still have a lot of inspiration for those who come after them.

This article will take stock of the rising stars that failed to reach the top in the bear market of 2018. From the tokens Network Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum Classic, to the public chains NEO and EOS, and the platform Internet Comouter.

1. Bitcoin Cash

Bitcoin Cash, BCH, is Bitcoin Cash. It is both a payment network and a cryptocurrency. As of March 9, it is the 27th cryptocurrency in terms of market value on the cryptocurrency rankings. It was created in August 2017 and is a hard fork of the Bitcoin blockchain. It reached its highest point in history on December 23, 2017, with a single BCH worth $3,923. Its price generally maintains similar fluctuations to BTC.

Footprint Analytics – Price of BTC and BCH

When Bitcoin Cash forked, it was to increase the 1M block limit of BTC. Today, it has reached a maximum block size of 32MB. It processes far more transactions per second than BTC. The transaction fee is also lower than BTC. However, in terms of market value, Bitcoin Cash has never been able to beat BTC.

Why it didn't work

BCH continues Satoshi Nakamoto's vision and deepens its efforts in peer-to-peer support systems. It is usually used as a means of payment, such as cross-border transfers. BTC continues to develop as a value storage tool and has now become digital gold, with its payment function gradually fading. There is a natural gap in the value corresponding to the functions of the two. BCH cannot surpass BTC for the time being due to its positioning.

The reason why BCH has not been successful since the bear market in 2018 is that in addition to its own positioning, it has also been affected by the Fed's interest rate hikes, balance sheet reduction, and the decline of US stocks. It missed the best opportunity to surpass BTC.

With the coming of a new round of bear market and the influence of political factors, BTC may face a new wave of downward pressure. As a peer-to-peer payment method, BCH may have a greater demand for circulation payment, and many people believe that it will become the next big thing, just like people's views on Sonala now.

2. Ethereum Classic

BTC hard forked into BCH. ETH, which is often mentioned together with BTC, also has its own sister, Ethereum Classic. Even a network that combines ETH technology and BTC concepts has been unable to shake Ethereum's status in the industry.

Ethereum's hard fork occurred in July 2016. In order to recover the assets stolen by hackers from TheDAO, founder Vitalik Buterin (V God) proposed the idea of ​​a hard fork, and eventually Ethereum forked into Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.

Ethereum Classic, referred to as ETC, ranks 34th in the cryptocurrency market cap. In the fork, the original Ethereum vision and concept were maintained, with a higher degree of decentralization and community autonomy, but the computing power support is only 15%. Today, both the token price and ecological applications are far inferior to Ethereum.

Why it didn't work

Since the hard fork, the original Ethereum founder and team left to support and lead the current Ethereum, while Ethereum Classic was taken over by a new team.

From the perspective of supporters, the support computing power of Ethereum at the time of fork reached 85%, which is far more than Ethereum Classic, and the demand is also higher than Etheremu Classic.

From the perspective of ecological integrity, Ethereum has become the leader in TVL among public chains, but there are not many projects deployed on Ethereum Classic.

Therefore, from many aspects, even though Ethereum Classic was the party that adhered to the concept of decentralization and community self-governance, it ultimately failed to become a dominant force in the blockchain world.

3. NEO

NEO, formerly AntShares, is a public blockchain launched in China by Da Hongfei, Zhang Zhengwen and their team in 2014. In 2015, it was open sourced on Github and completed the capital accumulation of ICO. NEO supports the development of its own cryptocurrency, digital assets and smart contracts, and can achieve thousands of transactions per second, making its Token Neo a thousand-fold coin.

Neo's price has been rising rapidly. It was $0.08 when it was first released, and reached its historical peak of $198.38 on January 15, 2018, an increase of 2,478.75%. But it was a flash in the pan, and the overall downward trend can be clearly seen from the data of Footprint Analytics. The current price is $21.27.

Footprint Analytics – Price & Trading Volume of Neo

Why it didn't work

The once thousand-fold coin has fallen from grace and is now ranked 77th in market value, an unknown entity. This is not due to objective factors outside the crypto market that are causing poor performance, but is fundamentally caused by NEO itself:

• NEO’s code updates are ineffective

• Ecological development has almost stagnated.

• The degree of decentralization is weak. There are only 7 voting nodes, which are officially deployed by NEO.

As the saying goes, if the foundation is not solid, the earth will shake. If NEO cannot solve the above problems, it may continue to be surpassed in the new round of bear market.

EOS

In May 2017, block.one launched EOS as a smart contract platform and distributed operating system. It once became a strong competitor to Ethereum, the king of public chains, in 2018. At that time, Ethereum was skeptical of the market due to transaction congestion, sky-high gas fees, and the failure to release sharding technology.

EOS, on the other hand, has no handling fees and extremely fast transaction processing speed. Less than half a year after its launch, it had 30,000 daily active users, crushing Ethereum's less than 3,000 daily active users. It is known as the Ethereum killer.

Why it didn't work

1) It is essentially a centralized public chain

However, the young killer failed to kill the king of public chains, but lost to himself. EOS's extremely fast transaction processing speed is achieved at the expense of decentralization. EOS's consensus mechanism has 21 super nodes to process transactions, and small node operators cannot participate in it at all. Super nodes are elected by coin holders, which implies the risk of vote buying.

The POW consensus mechanism of Ethereum and Bitcoin is inefficient, while the Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus mechanism of EOS is extremely efficient. However, the core of blockchain is decentralization, and EOS is essentially more like a centralized chain, which is destined to fail to become the king in the decentralized world.

2) Weak ecosystem and no killer applications

Currently, most of the top public chains that are active have their own phenomenal applications, or at least have a hot protocol that is sufficient to support the development of the public chain. For example, Anchor on the Terra chain. But EOS does not have it. Although there are some sporadic project deployments, they have failed to spark sparks.

Secondly, although the EOS official has repeatedly expressed support for the ecological construction of EOS, as of March 9, the ecology on the EOS chain is still like a barren mountain. This directly leads to the value of EOS token EOS having no actual support and is prone to collapse.

5. Dfinity / Internet Computer

Dfinity is a decentralized cloud technology platform. Founded in 2016, it is favored by venture capital institutions. In the bear market of 2018, it went against the trend and obtained $102 million in financing from a16z, which was the largest external investment of a16z that year.

Dfinity's vision is to create a public cloud computing platform that is more efficient, secure and available than AWS, and to hand over the control of the blockchain network to a distributed computer network. It is expected to launch Internet Computer in the second half of 2018 or the first half of 2019, but the actual Alpha mainnet will be launched in December 2020.

Why it didn't work

Dfinity took more than two years to deliver a product after raising funds, and the product was not unique in the market. The team was moving too slowly.

As for the goal of blockchain AWS, Alchemy, which provides blockchain development platform services for Web3 developers, was established in 2017 and now powers the products of most blockchain companies in the world.

All source code is released to the public domain. Github has existed since 2008 and is the platform used by most blockchain protocols to host source code.

Community autonomy, which allows the community to manage tokens, has already been implemented in many projects.

Moreover, the concept of Dfinity is very attractive and highly decentralized. However, there is often a huge gap between concept design and reality. Internet Computer has been continuously delayed in its launch and has lost the trust of the market to a certain extent.

Some thoughts

Although the blockchain world has no entity, it is actually like an undeveloped earth that rotates at high speed. It is an equal opportunity for all explorers, success can only be achieved by a few and there is no unified model to refer to. However, from the experience of the five projects in this article that were infinitely close to success, we can get the following inspiration:

To keep up with the development of blockchain, targeted solutions to problems need to be delivered in a timely manner.

Avoid excessive centralization and build a decentralized network.

Freedom without boundaries is not true freedom, and absolute democracy cannot achieve true democracy. Be cautious in community governance and maintain the rights design of democratic structures.