New Smart Contracts Can Revitalize the Pace of Blockchain Development

The crypto industry has seen plenty of ups and downs over the last few years, but for most in the community, “the bottom” is defined by a long bear market that starts out promising, ends unprofitable and is punctuated by several “hard forks” that cause many projects to split off from the legacy chain.

Some projects, including Binance Coin (BNB), Tezos (XTZ), EOS (EOS) and Cardano (ADA), were able to ride out these phases and emerge relatively unscathed. Others, including IOTA (MIOTA), Stellar (XLM) and Tron (TRX), were hit harder and saw their market caps drop to all-time lows.

Remember the initial coin offering craze that took over the market from 2017 until 2018? The market eventually collapsed—largely because Bitcoin, the underlying blockchain which all cryptocurrencies and decentralized applications (Dapps) depend on, became the sole currency accepted by thousands of major cryptocurrency exchanges.

A few of these projects have been struggling with liquidity issues, and many projects are finding it hard to generate new business models. As a result, a few smart contract-oriented projects with good concepts that had been in the market for some time have been struggling, and their market share in the smart contract arena has been diminished. This is where the future of digital currencies really is: In the evolution of smart contracts, which are at the heart of the financial blockchains and distributed ledgers of major tokens.

Thankfully, we are seeing decentralized technology projects filling in the cryptocurrency evolution gaps. There is a strong chance that central banks in China, Russia, and Singapore will be looking at DeFi projects in order to adapt them to the digital versions of their fiat currencies. Critics of the Bitcoin adoption in El Salvador, where the token is now legal tender, explain that the supporting technology is already old.

Imagine a world where a financial service provider could easily be decentralized. DeFi apps have the ability to work as their own service provider. But can decentralized financial technology help existing financial institutions compete with the latest digital technology? Blockchain startups are developing DeFi protocols that offer smart contracts for fiat to Bitcoin conversion and for other asset transfers. This is what the blockchain world really needs.