With this catastrophic bear market upon us, the center of attention is wrapped around the price action of digital assets and the endurance of these protocols. Bear markets have a way of weeding out the incompetent competition, projects that have survived previous bear markets make for better investments as they have proven their sustainability.
The overall sustainability of a protocol relies on the design of its infrastructure. An inadequately designed system is bound to fail inevitably, and it falls back on the underlying developers behind the project. With the blockchain space under current scrutiny, I figure it best to highlight some notable figures and their contributions to the space.
** Silvio Micali (Algorand)**
Silvio Micali is an MIT professor and the founder of Algorand, a self-sustaining decentralized distributed ledger supporting thousands of decentralized applications. Micali’s theory and practice of 2-party computation, electronic cash, and blockchain technology awarded him the Turing Award in 2012, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the tech world.
Algorand’s main net launched in 2019 and has since then proved to be among the most sustainable, cheapest, energy-efficient ledgers on the market. With a market cap of $2.12 billion, Algorand has a transaction throughput of 4 seconds. In the last week, the protocol has done over 8 million transactions with an average fee of $0.0004(forty-thousandths of a penny).
Leemon Baird (Hedera Hashgraph)
Dr. Leemon Baird is the founder and Chief Scientist of Hedera Hashgraph, another distributed ledger on the market. Dr. Baird has over 20 years of tech and startup experience and was once a computer science professor at the US Air Force Academy. Dr. Baird created and patented the hashgraph consensus algorithm, so no other blockchain protocol can utilize hashgraph technology.
Hedera is an enterprise-grade distributed ledger with a transaction throughput of 3-5 seconds. With over 2 billion total transactions conducted, Hedera is the most used distributed ledger on the market. Fees are also under a cent sitting at $0.0001(ten thousandths of a penny). In the last week, Hedera has done over 3 million transactions and has a current market cap of $1.35 billion.
Gavin Wood (Ethereum, Polkadot, Kusama, etc.)
Dr. Gavin Wood has arguably made some of the most significant contributions to the crypto space. Prior to his blockchain background, Dr. Wood served as a consultant for Microsoft and built the software systems for OxLegal, a smart contract text editor. He is the co-founder of Ethereum, Polkadot, and Kusama. He created the Solidity smart contract language alongside Ethereum’s Virtual Machine. After departing from the Ethereum Foundation, he went on to create the Web3 Foundation, coining the term “Web3”.
Ethereum is currently the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap. In the last week, Ethereum has done over 8.6 million transactions with a market cap of over $128 billion. Transaction fees fluctuate wildly and have gone up to $9.60 in the past seven days. Nevertheless, Ethereum was a game-changer for the blockchain space.
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena)
Stuart Popejoy has 15 years of experience building trading systems for establishments like Pragma Securities. He directed JP Morgan’s Emerging Tech Blockchain group and alongside Kadena co-founder Will Martino, created the company’s prototype cryptocurrency JPM Coin. After developing the Kadena blockchain, Popejoy also created the custom Pact smart contract language similar to Solidity. Kadena is a Proof-of-Work distributed ledger offering a multi-chain approach with Bitcoin-level security and free gas fees. The Pact programming language comes with a built-in bug detection feature making it harder to disrupt on-chain operations.
**Satoshi Nakamoto (Bitcoin) **
Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonymous founder of the first cryptocurrency Bitcoin. No one knows if this identity is connected to a single individual or maybe a conglomerate of developers. Nakamoto created the first blockchain database and published the Bitcoin whitepaper. Up until 2010, Nakamoto was an active developer on the Bitcoin network, once it began trading on exchanges, he (they?) vanished.
Bitcoin has a current market cap of $393 billion. It remains the top cryptocurrency by market cap and has seen massive growth in adoption over the past few years. It remains the only true decentralized currency on the market, yielding returns never before seen by any other asset class.
Bottom Line
This bear cycle is no less brutal than the last and, in the end, only the strongest survive. With all the hype and optimism subsiding, developers can focus on optimizing their projects, and these are just a few notable creators in the space.