It's no news that a part of staying competitive in an ever expanding business ecosystem is adapting one's blueprint to industry trends over the course of operation through times.
Failure to adapt has always proved detrimental to revenue and consumer stability and growth.
A little trip down history has businesses like Nokia, a rather famous mobile phone brand which dominated the mobile phone market in the late 1990s and early 2000s. However, Nokia failed to transition to smartphones effectively, underestimating the impact of Apple's iPhone and Android devices. Nokia's market share dwindled, leading to its sale to Microsoft in 2014.
What did they not adapt their blueprint to?
Simple, User Experience!
A phone as hard as a rock is cool, but is it developer friendly enough to birth increased good user experience?
Nokia's most critical error was underestimating the smartphone revolution spearheaded by Apple's iPhone in 2007 and Google's Android OS. Nokia continued to rely on its outdated Symbian operating system, which could not compete with the more advanced iOS and Android systems in terms of user experience and app ecosystems.
In an attempt to catch up, Nokia developed the MeeGo OS, but internal conflicts delayed its launch. When it finally arrived, it was too late to gain traction in the market. In 2011, under CEO Stephen Elop, Nokia formed a strategic partnership with Microsoft, adopting the Windows Phone OS. However, this move was controversial and perceived as a desperate measure. The Windows Phone failed to attract enough users and developers, further eroding Nokia's market share
By 2013, Nokia's mobile phone division was sold to Microsoft. This acquisition was intended to bolster Microsoft's presence in the smartphone market, but it did not succeed. The combination of Nokia's hardware with Windows software did not resonate with consumers, leading to further losses and eventually, Microsoft writing off the acquisition as a failure
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Users Decide The Product, Service and Trend That Stands
This is evident in the case of Nokia and with many more cases including Toy “R” Us’s failure to adapt to E-commerce and changing retail trends leading to a bankruptcy filing in 2017.
MySpace, losing to Facebook by user experience in 2008 and eventually getting sold in 2011 and the list goes on.
Now comes along, blockchain technology and crypto, with artificial intelligence of course, but that is not today's focus.
Crypto and blockchain technology is becoming an increasingly powerful space as the day goes by. Interestingly, there are over 23k web3 companies and across this number, over $96 billion has been injected for developments via VC funding according to a statistics report.
People are finding the concept of semi-anonymous transactions, borderless payments and decentralized finance intriguing to say the least and the numbers on-chain speaks for itself.
I usually don't pay attention to VC fundings but was deeply attracted to a particular project that recently received $70 million in a Series A and Series B funding.
Polymarket - A Prediction Market
Polymarket recently secured a $70 million funding to continue the development of its “blockchain-based” prediction market that has already seen over $202.7 million of predictions made so far, this year!
As the name implies, what you do on this platform is predict outcomes of events, this can be political events, sports, crypto-related, etc.
Barely looking through the homepage of Polymarket, you can see interesting levels of engagement.
And this is just the beginning.
It's no surprise these projects receive insane funding volumes, it's built on blockchain tech, that in itself is a golden marketing ticket.
More and more businesses are beginning to understand the potentials of building blockchain technology and crypto, the next couple of decades will see some interesting list of applications built on blockchain solving real world problems.