@rrhoover It's been a crazy up and down journey. Trust is a very difficult problem to solve. Our approach has been to publish attestations to the blockchain whenever users "verify" their personal information with us (e.g. a Facebook account or phone number). The system is built so that there can be many future attestation providers though. You can imagine a world where a university can attest that a user received a degree there. Another attestation service may verify that a seller has completed many successful transactions on an existing e-commerce platform and therefore should immediately be seen as a trusted seller on Origin. Of course, privacy is also very important, so we have to be careful of what data is published vs. not on-chain. More generally, there have been a lot of other learnings. On the negative side, we've seen that there are unique challenges to porting mainstream users to crypto/blockchain apps. There are many hurdles that must be overcome. To give an example, writing data on chain right now requires Ethereum gas. Very few users will want to pay to update their profile, create a listing, or write a review. As such we had to launch an implementation of meta-transactions, a technique that allows developers to pay for the data writes on behalf of users. This has improved our usage numbers dramatically. On the plus side, we've received an overwhelming about of support from our global community for the mission we are tackling. We have users, partners, and investors in markets all over the world. People care about this mission. As an open-source project, we've had over 170 developers contribute to our product development despite having a full-time core team of only 17 individuals. We've proven that crypto-economic incentives are highly motivating to users and see a lot of promise in creating a flywheel that can create viral growth (as soon as some of the major UX challenges and other blockers are removed). We're very excited about 2020 and beyond here at Origin.

@hellobetkowski @alphahunter Appreciate your support for our vision of the future! Thank you.

@parag_r That's the biggest issue with blockchain right now is lack of understanding. I think there needs to be more effort spent in making it more 'accessible' for everyone because the fundamental ideas behind this stuff could revolutionize the way we interact online.

@parag_r check out https://originprotocol.com 🙂

@parag_r @mark_beare We totally agree. We are in the early innings here. Blockchain and crypto tech is still very difficult to use for the average mainstream consumer. Going forward, we have to leverage the best parts of the technology (global/permissionless payments, the ability to allow everyone to own a piece of the network, peer-to-peer communications and transactions, censorship-resistance, etc.) while abstracting away all the complexity. Right now, our product is still focused on early adopters of crypto, but in the next year we will be shifting our focus more and more to the mainstream. This will require a lot of technical innovation, but also breakthroughs in product design and abstraction so we can make it damn simple for everyday users.

@bild96 Thank you Abdullah!