Back in the early days of the Internet, each site operated much like a bulletin board, acting as a standalone entity that didn’t have the ability to communicate with another site. The technology that allowed people on one bulletin board to communicate with another did not exist.
That’s until 1984, when two Stanford students decided they wanted to communicate with one another, through the internet, when at different campus buildings.
What they ended up creating was the TCP/IP protocols, the same protocols, which made it possible, for the first time, for sites in different areas to connect with one another.
Although the technology was a huge breakthrough, at the time there were no hardware products that supported the new TCP/IP protocols. However, not long after, those same Standard students created the first network router.
Those Stanford students, Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, later would launch the company that would become Cisco Systems, causing the internet exploded from 250 websites in 1993 to 30 million by 2000, Cisco’s stock went from worth $640 million to nearly $19 billion over the same period.
Why does any of this matter?
No one could have foreseen what would end up happening with the internet, but it was the TCP/IP protocol that made it all happen.
It allowed for what we call the “network effect,” which is a phenomenon where increased numbers of people or participants to improve the value of a good or service.
The same thing is happening with cryptocurrencies right now. Each blockchain is operating as its own entity, without the ability to communicate with other blockchains. For example, you cannot move data from Ethereum to Stellar or vice versa.
How would you like it if you could not click a link in a Google search and go to the desired webpage? Well, that’s basically how things work in the cryptocurrency world right now.
However, the ability for Blockchains to connect with one another and create the “network effect,” is not far away, and once it happens, everything will change, just like the internet changed with the TCP/IP protocols.
Those Stanford students are responsible for creating the technology that gave way to a $5 trillion dot-com explosion… Reason being, they unleashed the “network effect.”
There are several companies all working to solve this issue, but the one we like the best is AION, which we believe is the one that’s going to get there first.
Communication between blockchains is a real problem because moving information from one blockchain to another does not exist.
Ethereum is very easy to use, for this reason, it is a favorite among ICOs, but after the ICO launch, the need for faster and cheaper transactions are critical. Ethereum just doesn’t get the job done.
Several projects have switched from Ethereum to Stellar after the ICO has finished, which is nothing short of a nightmare, but still a necessity for longevity. Kik and Irene Energy are two blockchains that did just that.
Mobius, another blockchain, initially wanted to do its ICO in Ethereum, but because of the headache of changing blockchains later, it just decided to launch on Stellar from the start. It would have been far easier if it could have launched on Ethereum and then made the change later when appropriate.
Moving from one blockchain to another is not a smooth operation. Because tokens cannot cross from one blockchain to another, to do so, all the tokens have to be mapped, which cancels the old coin and issues a new coin on the new blockchain. It’s a big undertaking that really makes no sense.
Aion solves all of these problems and simplifies the whole process.
In the future, a cryptocurrency project will not just be affiliated with a single blockchain, they can use multiple blockchains to address different elements of their business. For example, ICOs could use Ethereum for raising capital and use Stellar to handle payment transactions.
The fact is, the blockchain sector is still in a very early stage, much like the internet was back in the early 90s. It’s going to look vastly different in a few years, and with the help of Aion, the power can truly be unleashed.