Blockchains aren't cars
Yesterday, I argued that Koinos is the Tesla of blockchain, but Tesla is a company that sells cars to drivers. Koinos isn't even a company--it's a blockchain. It's not selling anything. It's facilitating peer-to-peer computing.
The Koinos Group is a company, however. They're building the Koinos network, but they won't own it in the same way Tesla owns their cars. So, they can't (and wouldn't) sell the network or even access to it.
Andrew Levine (CEO of The Koinos Group) responded to yesterday's post on twitter (this is 1 of 12 tweets in a thread--highly recommend you read the whole thing):
At the end of the day, the primary objective motivating the design of @koinosnetwork is to build a PRODUCT that people LOVE using, the same primary objective motivating @elonmusk at Tesla
That's a great objective, but like I said, they can't sell this product. Once the Koinos network launches, The Koinos Group (TKG) will just be one contributing member of the broader community. Most other blockchain companies just choose to retain a large percent of their cryptocurrency and live off that money. There's no real business model. TKG doesn't have a huge stake because they did a fair launch that distributed their token more evenly.
Tesla is incentivized to build great cars so people will buy them. TKG is incentivized to build the most usable blockchain in the world so that developers will want to build apps that attract more people to using blockchains in their day-to-day lives. But that still isn't a business model--it's an open-source, open-data platform that anyone can use for free.
TKG will sustain their business by...
- creating the most usable tooling and infrastructure on top of this platform
- offering consulting/training to enterprises that want to build on the best blockchain
They'll probably be competing against others that build on Koinos, but they'll have the first mover advantage and name recognition. It's a solid strategy, but it is a big shift in the nature of their work. I have confidence that the team can adapt, but the Koinos network will be here to stay regardless of what happens to The Koinos Group.
More tomorrow,
-Luke
P.S. Happy new year! Hit reply and let me know what your resolutions are for 2022 (even if they don't have anything to do with Koinos)