Recently, we have seen a lot of blockchain projects successfully completing ICOs that declare they will build products which allow millions of ordinary users to gain extra revenue from their unused/idle resources.
Basically, within every smartphone or home/office computer we have three major resources that can be monetized — CPU, storage and internet broadband.
1. Unused computing power
Every device has a lot of spare computing capacity that can be used for performing complicated calculations for projects such as attempting to cure diseases, protein folding, searching for extraterrestrial life, detecting and analyzing asteroids, etc.
2. Unused storage
Distributed storage — this is when people rent out their unused hard disk space for others to use it and get paid in crypto.
- Filecoin (Raised ~$257 Million)
- Storj ( Raised ~$20 Million)
- Substratum (Raised ~$13.8 Million)
3. Unused bandwidth
Unused bandwidth can be sold to companies that offer VPN or CDN services for example, or to users who need multiple IP exit nodes for their businesses or another activity.
All of these projects claim to be open-sourced and based on blockchain with a native ERC-20 token.
Let’s imagine that some of these projects succeed, and these companies will build products that actually work. Apart from this being very exciting, it also opens up new possibilities for cross-product integration and synergies.
Once the software is open-sourced and has an ERC20 compatible token, it can be easily integrated into ONE single software.
Ordinary users will then be able to install one application instead of the usual three. It can be something with simple UI and on the backend — all the tokens will be exchanged to a single crypto-currency. Decentralized exchanges like 0x can be integrated into this schema in order to handle token exchanges on the background.
I believe there will be many successful collaborations in this area, and many possibilities will be available to developers — just taking separate projects and integrating them into one killer-product that will monetize ALL IDLE RESOURCES in one easy-to-use application.
But all of this will only be possible if someone really succeeds in building a product. That’s why I believe that we need much more competition in all of these areas. More and more projects will drive competition and motivate teams to deliver results, for everyone’s benefit!