No one can deny last year was the year of ICOs, we must have had thousands being announced every single week. Of course a lot of that had to do with the bullmarkets, making it possible for just about everyone to feel "brave" enough to speculate on any idea that was half baked to say the least.

We could effectively say that when ethereum became the standard, at least for a little while, just about anything could be turned into an ICO with some basic knowledge of coding and a website. A whole year later we can clearly see that most of them failed, and some are even blaming some of the negative pricing of ether specifically to those ICO's underdelivering and running out of liquidity to continue their development, but that is a subject for another conversation.

The focus on Dapps

I think the markets may have learnt an important lesson here: We can't just rely on speculation, it's way too risky and not sustainable. In other words, the over simplistic idea that we could just come up with a name, a .io domain and a neat graphic of a roadmap has stopped working as effectively on attracting new money.

This had sparked developers into working on what I believe makes more long term sense: User experience. It's a lot easier to imagine an app that is so friendly, so easy to use, that people gravitate to it simply because they are having fun. Just like that, it's not incredibly hard to imagine economic systems attached to these applications.

Who leads the cryptosphere on this field? That is a heated debate, and it really depends on personal definitions of the word "leading", but it seems obvious that EOS is charging with the RPMs all the way up at the moment, trying to solidify some footing. This of course, means that the new battle ground, the new area for competition is shifting from development alone, to early adopters of dapps, with the hopes of reaching massive adoption.

Maybe we just Tokenize it all

This goes hand in hand with dapps, and honestly, just about everything could be turned into a game of sorts. Just about any social activity online could become an excuse to collect tokens, to exchange virtual assets and thus edifice an economy around it.

So the answer to me is quite simple. The platform that is the most scalable, the easiest to develop dapps on is going to win in the long run. Yes, price is important, yes everyone loves to look at charts, but that is short term thinking and short term focusing, and I for one don't care that much at all about RSIs, moving averages and other indicators. I want to know what dapps are on the assembly lines, because I think that is how we win the battle.