Global adoption of crypto is on the rise. According to the recent Chainalysis Global Crypto Adoption Index, the overall year-over-year uptake increased 880% compared to 2020 as seen in the chart below.
Courtesy of Chainalysis 2021
The Chainalysis team found differing drivers of this increase based on economic variance among regions.
Specifically, respondents within emerging economies cited prime adoption drivers such as the desire to maintain the value of their savings, carry out day-to-day transactions, as well as send and receive payments.
Chainalysis found that massive investment from institutions was the main reason behind the pump within developed regions including North America, Western Europe, and Eastern Asia.
Regardless of the causal variance, within each unique region the respective reasons were compelling.
Obstacles to Broader Crypto Adoption
While not addressed in the Chainalysis report, one of the main obstacles to broader adoption of cryptocurrency is the gap separating it from the sovereign currencies of countries around the world.
But one company in particular is working to change that.
According to Convergence co-founder, Oscar Yeung, his organization is committed to bridging the gap between fiat and crypto.
“We really have a vision of bringing real world assets on-chain. A lot of times people invest in Bitcoin, Ethereum, digital native assets, but in the ideal world blockchain can be used for much more than that. We can gain access to real world investments, such as private companies, real estate or private investment opportunities.
Convergence is here to offer the full product suite, from offering platform to exchange platform, to gain access, to democratize access to all sorts of investment opportunities globally,” said Yeung, in his exclusive interview to DailyCoin.
In other words, Convergence is a decentralized interchangeable asset protocol seeking to converge assets around the work on parallel blockchains.
Creating a New Marketplace
Yeung says this will be possible because of the innovative business model of his enterprise.
“We saw from the very beginning how Uniswap was able to revolutionize trading, where you can have 24/7 unlimited liquidity pairs. That caught my imagination.
From there we innovated, changing the trading pairs into what we’re used to such as stablecoins like USDT, USDC, or even Ethereum to mirror assets that are in the real world. And therefore we can create that new marketplace that didn't exist before in a traditional sense,” said Yeung.
However, to create a marketplace that didn’t previously exist requires the buildout of a purpose-built infrastructure to support that marketplace, because the infrastructure didn’t exist either – except in the minds of Convergence developers.
“While this infrastructure is developing in this market, we’re also seeing the potential of how that can expand even further than the original vision. We’re tying one thing to another and then fractionalizing it, we’re experimenting while building.
The possibilities before us with artwork NFTs and on-chain gaming is just the beginning. Defining what they become and can be is going to be the future,” he said.
IDO as Time-Shifted Issuance
According to Yeung, another future-forward offering is the IDO, which stands for an Initial Decentralized Offering.
The idea is similar to the launch of a new coin as part of an Initial Coin Offering, but in this case the asset would have a time-shifted issuance as a DeFi property on the Ethereum network.
“What we trade are redeemable tokens for the future. The market basically extends first access to these tokens to large private investors. The rest of us retail investors only have access to a limited number on a decentralized exchange.
We’re exploring Solana, Avalanche, Moonbeam, and tokens we can gain access to. We act as a bridge for locked Ethereum-based tokens moved and unlocked another blockchain - it’s very exciting,” said Yeung.
On The Flipside
- The DeFi sector is growing rapidly and holds a lot of promise, however, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler has said he plans to regulate DeFi.
- It remains to be seen if that regulatory rhetoric becomes reality, and what its impact might be on businesses such as Convergence.
Watch the full interview here:
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