Crypti Foundation released on 23rd of December their first DApp (Decentralized App), Crypti Tokens, that allows users to issue custom tokens and to send and receive them on the Crypti Tokens sidechain.
The Crypti Foundation team has grown from the original 5 members, and aims to build a Decentralized Application Platform that is useable, safe and economic, and thus falls in direct competition to the Ethereum project.
They released their first DApp earlier this week, that is able to manage colored coins, but these colored coins only work on their sidechain, not on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Crypti Tokens
In their press release, the Crypti Foundation states:
“In summary, Crypti Tokens is a decentralized application allowing users to issue their own custom tokens, and for those tokens to be sent and received amongst users on the Crypti Tokens sidechain. Furthermore, using Crypti's Dapp Toolkit, developers will be able to issue their own custom token, for use within a single dapp.”
This statement looks a lot like a description of Colored Coins: they are very useful, but there are a variety of ways to implement them, and the fact that Crypti is developing its own sidechain to issue tokens over, seems at least redundant. Why not use the Bitcoin blockchain, with its immense userbase and shared support? Why spread yet another blockchain that has no additional functionality over existing solutions?
Why Another Blockchain?
According to Nathan Wosnack, CEO at uBITquity and COO at Equibit Dv Corp, there’s really no need for yet another system like this:
“If it has its own chain and own tokens, this is extremely concerning to me as the control over the consensus is completely in the hands of whomever controls the mining and distribution of the pay out on this, the limits, and so forth. Bitcoin makes much more sense: its blockchain is much more popular, and therefore secure at this time, and there’s a number of mature software development tools and API for it already.
Bitcoin requires Proof of Work. The consensus and security is in its massive distributed user-base. I trust Colored Coins (our company is using them for our services and projects), true Bitcoin (via platforms like BlockCypher), and perhaps Colu which created a meta-data layer on top of a bitcoin transaction, and recording volumes or amounts of bitcoin exchanged.
Second to this I trust Ethereum, but I trust the aforementioned more because of Bitcoin's user base ("Can't be Evil"), the fact it has more to lose due to its massive market cap.
Why have another foundation? Why reinvent the wheel? Use Colu, use BlockCypher. Don't fall for more non-innovative non-solutions. Ask yourself; what problem does Crypti Foundation and Crypti Tokens solve that needs solving or hasn't already been solved?”
One could argue that with Nathan’s reasoning, nobody would ever rise up with a competing product to existing solutions, and that’s bad for the end user and competition, but it’s also true that in this period of boiling development and critical time for Bitcoin, coming up with so many parallel platforms may not be so healthy for the whole environment. Efforts could be directed to developing more innovative technology, the software ecosystem is still nearly virgin.
Unjustified Hype?
It looks like the entire point of the “product” described in the press release is to address prior shortcomings. With this release, Crypti are not providing any solutions at the cutting edge of blockchain technology, they are just trying to catch up with the technology that is already available on the marketplace. Colored coin technology is documented at ColoredCoins.org, the Bitcoin blockchain can be used with this functionality already. Colored coins web wallets exist too: Coinprism, ChromaWallet and Colu, and it is actually possible to store colored coins on paper wallets.
Eric Grill, CEO at CoinOutlet, also seems a bit puzzled by a first examination of the Crypti release:
“I love distributed applications but they [Crypti] seem to be a little behind what others have already done, just from what they are saying. But there might be something more there.
I’d have to play around with it to really get a handle on it, but it seems very similar to things that NXT is doing. And DApp is being lead by Ethereum at this point so comparing it to those would be more in line. But to really get into it I would need to research it more.”
While The Crypti Foundation surely isn’t doing anything evil (no doubt just trying to look polished and increase sales), they probably aren't doing the blockchain userbase any particular favors either. Their offer adds to, if only a little, the amount of confusion surrounding these relatively new developments working on top of the blockchain technology.
With this “early release” they are probably trying to profit somewhat from their enterprise, and that's only natural, but at this point in time their product really seems far behind in development when compared to the competition.