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The Champions Of Crypto: Who Are The Titans Driving Mainstream Adoption?

It wasn’t long ago that Bitcoin was still magic internet money for nerds. You remember someone ordering a pizza with 10,000 BTC in 2010 and thought, “That’s cute. Of course, a couple of tech geeks would use their magic internet money to have a pizza delivered.”

Crypto has evolved since then into a full-fledged blockchain ecosystem. Projects are innovating at the protocol level allowing for immutable, permissionless, transparent, censorship resistant transactions, while doing away with the need for trusted intermediaries.  

This powerful combination of technologies has given idealists and supporters of freedom a new hope across the entire globe. However, the proliferation of ICO (initial coin offerings) hype has enabled some company founders to pen a quick white paper setting out the details of their fundraising for a quick money grab and investors to find the next flip. People want to make money, after all.

The true champions of crypto are not in it for financial gain. They're driven by the impact this world will have with the mainstream adoption of crypto. The people highlighted below are just a few of only a handful of titans who are in the trenches every day helping this industry to grow. They embody decentralization and it’s not uncommon for them to make their way around the world kickstarting the movement wherever they go. These are just a few of their recent highlights.

Changpeng Zhao (CZ) of Binance Launches Uganda Exchange and the $1B Fund

Binance just launched their crypto-fiat Uganda Exchange on June 28th. You might ask why Uganda? The revenue will be much higher in established markets. Binance’s mission is to spread the adoption of crypto to the masses. CZ says, “Uganda is a much less developed financial economy. To get crypto adopted in a country where only 11% of the population has a bank account will take years of painstaking drive. You have to educate users, build the economy, and essentially build everything from scratch.”

In terms of economic development, the company wants to create jobs for 5,000 people in five years time with a longer term ambition of creating 50,000 jobs there for the industry. CZ goes on to say, “I want to help Africa grow. I want to help South America grow. I want to help Asia grow. I want to help other humans beings, but I can only do my little bit to help. I strongly believe that crypto will make a massive positive impact in people’s lives.”

Binance at The Africa Blockchain Conference 2018

Scaling the way Binance invests resources throughout the world is no easy task. That’s why they launched the Binance Labs $1B fund. To invest in building out the infrastructure of blockchain and see applications with real use cases being built. They want to help the industry become bigger by helping young companies all over the world get off the ground. Binance believes this is the right thing to do as a company even if the ROI (return on investment) calculation is not clear. They are an organization with a lot of influence and their responsibility as a leader in the industry is not taken lightly.

Clearly, that’s still not doing enough as they also have a separate Binance charity foundation. They have already decided to donate to a few projects in Africa and ask that these charities be 100% transparent recording everything on a blockchain. Doing so spreads the awareness of crypto and educates the masses. Binance will cover all the admin fees. This has attracted the attention of many governments that have reached out to work with the company.

Mick Hagen of Mainframe Goes on a World Airdrop Tour and Donates 1,000 ETH to the Freedom of the Press Foundation

Mainframe provides censorship resistant messaging. They stand for freedom and privacy for the entire world. One should be able to say what they want and no central body will be able to control that. And they have traveled the world to get close to their community holding their infamous airdrop events.

They’re currently doing a global airdrop in preparation of their token distribution on July 4, but what really impressed me with this team was their world airdrop tour. They went to great lengths to drive mainstream adoption of the decentralized movement. The CEO of Mainframe, Mick Hagen, says, “It amazes me how people are willing to travel from all over the world to attend one of our events. One lady flew in from China to Warsaw. One group drove for 25 hours, too, and they followed us all through Europe.”

Mainframe did real physical airdrops of their tokens. They traveled all around the world (Hong Kong, Warsaw, Shanghai, Zug, Beijing, Paris, Tokyo, London, Seoul, Amsterdam, New York, Berlin) to meet their community. Believers and supporters showed up in droves. Lines were out the door, balloons fell out of the sky, they gave away $3 million, but most important of all, they were able to mobilize people physically and get supporters of freedom and privacy to meet each other. For true mainstream adoption of a protocol like that, this is what needed to happen.

Mainframe Airdrop in Amsterdam. The crowd goes wild.

The mission that Mick and the team are on is going to be grueling, but they are fearless. They held an airdrop event in China where the government is known to censor WeChat messages. One may think governments wouldn’t like censorship resistant messaging, but one government in the Middle East is going to pilot the Mainframe protocol.

To really scale this out, Mainframe can’t do this alone. They donated 1,000 ETH (Ether) to Freedom of the Press Foundation. Mick Hagen says, “The Mainframe team is thrilled to be supporting an organization whose work we all deeply believe in. Our community is committed to the protection of freedom, privacy, and digital security, and we are proud to support their mission beyond the contribution being made today.” This speeds up the research and adoption of decentralized technology for combatting censorship and promoting security.

Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum Provides Scalability Research Grants and Advises the Community Fund

Vitalik understands that, at a technical level, scalability is the single most important challenge that needs to be solved in order for blockchain applications to reach mass adoption. This crypto titan knows the fastest path to overcome this hurdle is to partner with the worldwide community. The Ethereum Scalability Research and Development Program that was announced in late January will provide grants of $50,000 to $1,000,000 to groups around the world working on two strategies to scaling: sharding (requires a small percentage of nodes to see and process every transaction) and off-chain (transactions only interact with the underlying blockchain in when needed) solutions. Vitalik wants to support a multi-pronged strategy toward Ethereum scalability.

Scalability is just the first step to mainstream adoption. We still need to build out the open-source infrastructure, tools, and applications of the decentralized internet. The Ethereum Community Fund, advised by Vitalik, has a global mission to support that by providing grants of between $50,000 to $500,000. Over $100 million in fiat, ETH, and other tokens were raised for the fund.

Louis Holbrook, one of the lead developers of the PSS protocol, speaking at Devcon3 in Cancun.

Ethereum sure knows how to serve it’s global community of developers and ecosystem-builders. Their popular conference, Devcon, will take place this year in Prague. They’ve come a long way from starting as a small gathering in Berlin in 2014 and growing to 2,000 strong in Cancun last year. The brightest developers from all over the world come together to connect, learn and share what they are building to make the world better with crypto.

At a time when so many “suits” are entering the industry, it is awe-inspiring to see founders with huge ambitions to do good for people of this world. We can talk about the ICO hype all we want, but underneath the noise are the true champions of crypto driving mainstream adoption. People who are building out the infrastructure and technology to benefit humanity.

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Read Again Broooh https://www.forbes.com/sites/shermanlee/2018/07/03/the-champions-of-crypto-who-are-the-titans-driving-mainstream-adoption/

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