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The cryptocurrency industry is growing at a rapid pace, but there’s still a long way to go. With a market cap of around $275 billion, crypto is dwarfed by traditional assets like gold ($8 trillion) and the global stock market (around $90 trillion as of 2019). If we’re honest, it often feels like two steps forward, three steps back as we continue down the path to mass adoption. But that’s exactly why today, more than ever, collaboration is vital in the cryptocurrency space.
There are still many barriers that stand in our way and much we have to learn as we develop this technology together. From working with global regulators to creating more user-friendly products and scaling public chains for massive use, all these challenges are more easily solved when we join forces.
The Bitcoin Community Is Stronger Than Ever
Some of Bitcoin’s best moments have been achieved through solidarity and collaboration. One particular incident that I found striking was just recently when the community came together to disprove the rumors that Bitcoin’s creator Satoshi Nakamoto had moved 50 BTC from 2009.
We saw core developers and entrepreneurs like Jimmy Song, Nic Carter, and Jameson Lopp helping us to uncover the most likely truth about the coins using digital forensics. As the price dove rapidly and the market panicked, they quickly showed how unlikely it was that the bitcoins in question belonged to Satoshi.
And just consider the ongoing development of Bitcoin from just a few network nodes to the thousands running today and the enormous mining industry and infrastructure that’s built up around it with more sophisticated financial instruments being added all the time.
Innovations such as the Lightning Network and Liquid are striving to help the Bitcoin blockchain scale, and mining is becoming creative in order to be less power-intensive, with new cloud-based solutions and energy-efficient equipment.
Ethereum Will Bring the Next Wave of Adoption
The Etheruem developer community is truly admirable and, with its initiative to onboard 1 million devs, growing exponentially. As Ethereum pursues its goal of being the decentralized world computer and switching to ETH 2.0 to enable scalability for mass adoption, collaboration in the ecosystem is nothing short of amazing.
Think of everything that Ethereum has achieved today from smart contract enablement to bringing the blockchain industry to a whole new level of expansion. As a company, OKEx is proud of our latest partnership with Ethereum through our mining pool OKPool, becoming one of the first mining pools to successfully connect with the Topaz ETH 2.0 test network.
We have great respect for everything that Ethereum has done for the crypto community and the potential of ETH 2.0 and we’re truly excited to be contributing to the ETH ecosystem. In fact, we have already established a partnership with Prysmatic Lab and will continue to promote the development of ETH in the space.
Open Source Is the Key to Collaboration
The very nature of blockchain technology and open source projects encourages collaboration from a developer level all the way to the end-user. Anyone can inspect the code, build on it, and contribute to growing the ecosystem. To that end, launching OKChain is another achievement we’re especially proud of – not only its launch but the fact that we were able to commit to open source just two months later.
Being an open public chain is especially important to us and we aim is to make OKChain as decentralized as possible to encourage maximum collaboration. To achieve this, we have given each network node a high degree of autonomy, unlike some of our competitors, who largely control node operations.
This is key to enabling a growing set of decentralized finance and large-scale blockchain-driven commercial applications. We’re happy to welcome more and more partners like WhaleEx and BetProtocol to build on our public chain and help it to see success. We’re also pleased that we can allow startups to thrive using OKCloud, piggybacking off our technology and expertise to run exchanges of their own.
OKEx has always valued collaboration above all things, in all areas. This includes data ranking companies and regulators. As an exchange, we’re committed to compliance and providing transparency for our users. This is why we were at the forefront of encouraging exchange transparency and have recently partnered with skew data to better promote this together.
And unlike other exchanges, we take pride in being a Malta-based company. We have worked hard with regulators to ensure that we achieve compliance. With European legislation toughening up on cryptocurrency exchanges, the process has not been easy but we have managed to meet the new criteria through much dialogue and steady progress that enables us to continue working from the Blockchain Island.
It is this type of collaboration that enables our growth and the growth of the entire cryptocurrency space. The more closely all industry stakeholders work together the better–from developers to CEOs, regulators to consumers. The technology is still young and there is still so much to do. Uniting together to reach our goals is the only way we will continue to thrive.
About the Author: Jay Hao, a tech veteran, seasoned industry leader and the CEO of OKEx is the author of this article. He believes in blockchain’s potential to eliminate all transaction barriers, achieve unparalleled efficiency and lead to an improvement in the global economic system.
Jay views security, innovation and reliability as three core pillars of OKEx. He also places significant emphasis on his role as Chief Customer Service Officer ensuring that users can make their voices heard, leading to improvements in OKEx’ products and services.
With over 21 years of industry experience, Jay has served in multiple leadership roles in blockchain and semiconductor sectors.
Disclaimer: The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of NewsBTC
Image by Mike Sweeney from Pixabay
