Parity Technologies announced a couple a days ago the launch of Substrate, a set of tools for designing, creating and launching your own blockchain. You may have heard of Parity being mentioned in the context of Ethereum (it's one of Ethereum clients) or Polkadot. And you would be right, because here's what Gaving Wood, the head of Parity, said about Substrate:

“Substrate takes all of our lessons learned in building Ethereum and Polkadot and distills that down into a stack of tooling that allows you to get all of those same rewards… for free.”

Think of this collection of tools like you would think of a web server. It has everything you need to set up your own website. But instead of a website, you would be launching a full blown blockchain. Think "Steem-on-demand", or "Ethereum-on-demand", as everything you may think it belongs in a blockchain (block execution, consensus mechanism, currency management, smart contracts) is already there, either at a core level, or at a pluggable module. If you fancy a nice, techy lecture, go ahead and read the official announcement.

In many respects, I think this launch, although it's not a very spectacular event in terms of market, price, of other crypto memorabilia, marks an important milestone in our times. After EOS, another "do-it-yourself-blockchain" solution hits the shelves, this time even more customizable and even more interconnected (once you develop your blockchain with Substrate you can also integrate it with other blockchains following the Polkadot protocol).

We reached to the point where everybody can have their own blockchain, just like during the dot com bubble everybody could launch their own website.

Only this time we're playing not only with content, but with money and social organization. Whatever we think we know about both - money and social organization - will never look the same.

We do live extremely interesting times.

I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.