Announcing the Fuse network

For the last decade since crypto inception the world has debated the meaning of Bitcoin and the technology behind it for the future of our global economy. While Satoshi’s whitepaper talks about creating a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, a decade later, Cash biggest rivals are credit cards and payment apps, not crypto. The financial system is too complicated to be replaced with one single ledger. But the ability to easily launch and experiment with this new alternative asset class has accelerated the push towards decentralizing finance. Nowadays Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies have still not yet reached a level of use, superior to their counterparts. And are far from being a comfortable option for everyday payments. But the last waves of adoption in the crypto industry have created an ecosystem that took the ideas of decentralized finance and realized them in code.

Fuse was built on the idea that the next waves of cryptocurrency adoption will bring this technology to the hands of millions of new consumers worldwide. This next wave of adoption will be achieved by thousands of companies launching interoperable protocols and collaborating on one goal — building a new infrastructure for finance and change how money works in the process.

In order to reach mainstream adoption and on-board 99% of humanity that never touched this technology before, we believe we need to achieve 3 goals as a community:

1. Allow cheap, friction-less and open access to money

Integrating digital payments is a growing need that will become universal in the future, yet there is no easy way to build and offer services on the financial stack of today’s fragmented payment industry. Giving the ability for anybody to create an app that can easily have digital payments integrated into it, will give the power to entrepreneurs and financial service providers improving access for financial services worldwide. Reducing friction for on-boarding to crypto will pave the way for mainstream adoption.

2. Reduce cost for organizations to launch and operate

Blockchains are really good for storing value, but they are not that good as a store of data as there are data limits. Data is usually the most important asset for any modern business, and it’s also a big part of most business models and regulators attention nowadays. Being able to leverage the shared business processes that smart contracts provide and plug into them the meta-data that is created in real time during a transaction with a person, could change how payments work on the back-end. The benefit of having this tech-stack open source and public can bring true value from decentralization by lowering the cost of IT and by that lowering the bar for more players to join. Those players will not have to deal with the data by storing all of it in a costly database but they can minimize their exposure to user’s clients data (and to regulatory scrutiny) to the specific need required by their business.

3. Reach scale and privacy

Scale and privacy in blockchains are intertwined, as the data is required to be public to be verified, a completely private blockchain will not work. The more data read and written publicly on a blockchain the slower it will operate. Understanding how to fix this problem in an optimal way, takes us to somewhere between the privacy of using cash and the privacy of using a bank. And where exactly on that spectrum we will end up is still being worked out. Being able to take an abstract concept like privacy and apply it to the day to day life is not an easy task, but it’s clear that there are many ways to improve the social contracts on which we rely on when we are making transactions on today’s financial system. Most humans don’t really care how the data they are generating is being used. Trust minimizing software, like Blockchains, tries to fix that, and scaling it is only a matter of time until we find the right balance between private and public.

Those problems are currently being worked on by many companies in the crypto space, many of them share each others code and ideas to collaborate and experiment on an unprecedented scale. We are faced with a unique and near perfect alignment of time and technology to make fundamental changes to society and build new sustainable alternatives to existing business models. Cryptocurrencies really make sense when they are empowering new players, making money work 24/7, giving everybody universal access and are public and easy to use. We at Fuse believe those achievements are around the corner and built the Fuse platform based on those principals. On the Fuse stack it will be easy for anybody even without technical knowledge, to create a community and integrate a token into it. Using the Fuse Studio and the Fuse wallet let users from the real world interact with the token. All of this is running on top of the Fuse chain which is powered by a network of computers verifying all the transactions and removing the need for intermediaries for settlement.

We are excited to release the network over the next few weeks along with the Fuse Studio, wallet and on-boarding the first validators to the network.