The 2 biggest emerging opportunities in cryptocurrency

A few interesting bits of cryptocurrency news were announced within the past week. First, a team and project near and dear to me, Blockstream, publicly launched with a white paper for the first time rigorously documenting sidechains. Second, Oliver Bussmann, CIO of UBS, publicly stated ‘blockchain technology will not only change the way we do payments but it will change the whole trading and settlement topic.’ Finally, a group I advise, Counterparty was one of many Bitcoin based teams receivinginquiry letters from the SEC pertaining to unregistered securities.
I first met Blockstream cofounders Austin Hill and Adam Back in early 2014 when teaching a Cryptocurrency Seminar at Stanford. At the time there was decent buzz in the community around a project the two of them were working on that would fundamentally augment Bitcoin’s infrastructure and take it a step function forward. My simplified personal thesis on Bitcoin is, and has been for quite some time now, that the two greatest areas for innovation and value creation are:

This post was published at Venture Beat on November 2, 2014.