Adventures of a Unicorn — Community is King
The best ideas and businesses unite a community. There are numerous tech businesses that are only as powerful as the commitment of the crowd using the platform: obvious examples include Reddit, Ebay, and Airbnb. It goes beyond simply finding the required critical mass of users for a platform to be viable, to creating a loyal and dedicated community with momentum. The true ‘hockey stick’ of growth occurs when the network effect takes hold, and a business goes viral, and the customer base is self-recruiting and self-sustaining.
Much has been written about creating brand loyalty in marketing theory, and there are numerous retail businesses that try to inspire their customer base. Good examples include the Harley Davidson owners’ group, or Games Workshop: both inspire their fans to adopt the brand as a lifestyle choice, providing kinship with like-minded fans.
Socially too, we unite behind ideas. I highly recommend Yuval Noah Harari’s book Homo Sapiens for a stunning history of our species from seven thousand years BC. In it, he argues that we are unique as species, from our ability to create and believe ideas. We are the only species with shared ideas of things that are not physical: whether it is love for particular football team, a religion, or a nation. All of these are concepts, which when shared between a large group of people, create a community. Without enough people subscribing to support the idea, it is worthless. A great example of this is the idea of money.
A ten pound note in my wallet has no inherent value, other than the anticipation that it can be swapped for anything equal in value to ten British pounds. Luckily, there are vendors all over the UK who will accept my currency. Prior to physical money existing, around three thousand years ago, a barter system functioned so that it was commonly held that X amount of wheat could be swapped for X numbers of chickens. Both systems work perfectly because they have the confidence of the community using them. Any currency must have: durability, portability, divisibility, uniformity, limited supply, and acceptability.
Crypto cannot exist if the local currency is working efficiently. Crypto currencies are quicker, faster, cheaper. There is a huge sense of the financial infrastructure not working, and retail and institutional investors alike are looking for the next ecosystem. Any quick cursory glance at the crypto industry will reveal a community which is evangelical about its benefits. In theory, at the time of writing, a bitcoin is worth £9001. In practice, it is worth whatever the enthusiasm and confidence of the buying audience dictates. A crypto-coin, therefore, is best viewed as a community.
Interestingly, within crypto, there is the further niche of a community coin. This can be seen as a financial community on steroids. Utility tokens are crypto-currencies functional within a specific ecosystem. A company creates a global financial community that justifies its own currency to allow it to build its community and deliver unique services. Example coins are Binance BNB and Dacxi DAC.
Unlike other fintech companies, Dacxi’s has an entire community ecosystem, and the focus is on the ‘Crowd’, the people using the platform, not simply selling financial products nor simply creating a ‘platform’ to create a marketplace to connect buyers with sellers. This is in stark contrast to the ICOs strategy of ‘pump and dump’, where the issuer is simply looking to raise capital, with no vested interest in the coin’s long-term success thereafter.
The crypto venture exchange is pioneered by Dacxi, and will offer global crowd-lending opportunities, with the DAC coin at its heart. Businesses will be able to source funding from a global and motivated audience, and the crowd will have access to high quality global opportunities in an easily accessible format. The idea of crowd lending is sizeable in developed economies; there a number of leviathan businesses in this space, including Funding Circle, valued at £1.5bn, and well established — Zopa was founded in 2005.
There is currently no business that combines crowd lending and crypto at the same time — two very powerful overlapping sectors, which provides a potential multi trillion dollar industry.
In next week’s blog: the search for trust and authenticity
Read last week’s blog: Think Big, Act Small
Adventures of a unicorn is a business blog documenting the daily life of tech startup in hypergrowth. Dacxi is a unique crypto business in the crowd lending space.
DISCLAIMER:
All views expressed in this blog are my own and do not represent the opinions of any entity with which I have been, am now or will be affiliated.
Originally published at http://adventures-of-a-unicorn.com on August 20, 2020.
