Polygon & NFTs are accelerators for blockchain adoption
When we talk about blockchain adoption, we can differentiate enterprises on one hand, and end-users on the other hand.
Without enterprise adoption, there is almost no possible adoption from end-users.
Enterprise adoption
If blockchain technologies could seem “difficult” to integrate and are still having some limitations to be deployed at scale, there are some “layer 2” platforms that are making it easier for brands to implement.
You don’t know what is layer 2 ? You can check my glossary first. I talked about layer 2 here and here.
Polygon is one of the Ethereum layer 2 platforms.
The aim of Polygon is to make easier blockchain adoption by providing services. From scaling up the capabilities to support any enterprise for the maintenance of their network, they provide everything that is needed to really start a concrete blockchain project.
And it’s working! It’s very cool to see big brands starting blockchain-based projects!
Few examples :
- Instagram is introducing NFTs on its platform — https://about.fb.com/news/2022/05/introducing-digital-collectibles-to-showcase-nfts-instagram/
- Stripe is providing crypto payments on its platform — https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-crypto
- Adidas is launching an NFT project with Prada — https://news.adidas.com/originals/adidas-originals-and-prada-announce-a-first-of-its-kind-open-metaverse---user-generated-nft-project/s/30a29dad-6ded-4302-ae40-f9f2338e7298
- Flipkart (a major e-commerce platform in India) is launching Flipverse, a metaverse shopping experience — https://stories.flipkart.com/enter-the-flipverse-linkedin-live-event/
- Starbucks is launching a new NFT-based reward platform — https://waitlist.starbucks.com/#/landing
- Reddit is launching an NFT collection — https://cointelegraph.com/news/reddit-announces-new-blockchain-backed-collectible-avatars
All these new initiatives are running with Polygon. And here we are talking about big major brands, launching major projects that will impact millions of customers. Blockchain is not anymore a “dark tech for geeks”, it will slowly become part of daily usage of the web, and probably some users will almost never notice this switch.
The positive signal is coming from traditional web 2 companies that are starting web-3 & blockchain initiatives. This will clearly speed up the adoption of blockchain technologies.
Adoption for en-users
One of the major blockers to the mass adoption of blockchain technologies is the lack of use-case for “non-techie” people. If tomorrow everyone is collecting rewards that are NFT-based (from Starbucks, Flipkart, Reddit, or any other major brand), it will definitely speed up the blockchain adoption by giving the opportunity to non-tech people to get access to the blockchain ecosystem, to get used to a crypto wallet, to get used to Ethereum address…
For most of the people around me, blockchain, NFT are only weird buzzwords, and they have absolutely no idea about how they can benefit from it.
If they get an opportunity to get NFT rewards for their spending, if they get an opportunity to have a financial benefit after a certain amount of time by collecting some specific NFTs, they will surely get interested in it.
By multiplying integrations and use cases, it will be easier every day to enter this new world.
For companies, the entry cost to blockchain will reduce significantly when we will have millions of blockchain users already used to key core blockchain principles.
I’m still not a big fan of NFTs, but if it is the way to speed-up blockchain adoption, I’m definitely happy about it.
