Coinbase Has to Scale
New Money Needs a Coinbase/Kraken, ShapeShift/Changelly Alternative
Scaling Coinbase
If you've been in crypto for a while, you have a few ways to move your fiat into Bitcoin, including but not limited to Coinbase. You are likely relatively tech-savvy and understand the ins-and-outs of creating, navigating and managing your online presence. The average consumer does not share your level of expertise and to them, technology is a mystery and compounding it with finance... well that comfort-level isn't even on the map anymore.
New money needs a point-and-click user experience, and on the upside, Coinbase delivers. However, mix in ease-of-use with unprecedented demand, say that of the world's 4th largest economy, and as we've seen, things begin to go south quickly. To be clear, I.T. isn't my strong-suit, but I'd venture a guess that at the height of the new money bubble, many on-boarding market entry points (not just Coinbase) were struggling (and ultimately failing) to spin up enough servers to meet demand.
Diversifying Fiat To Crypto Conversion
So the task becomes, do we leave it to Coinbase and Kraken to carry the load, or do we look at diversifying market entry points? To some degree, currency exchangers Changelly and ShapeShift sought to catch some of that conversion overflow, but even that proved to be too much for them. On top of that, Visa and MasterCard chose to capitalize on the increase in demand by raising their fees to the exchanges, a move they were, and will continue to be entitled to, as it is just good business.
So here we stand. Tremendous new money demand, inadequate infrastructure at key entry points, and a lack of diversity leaving those entry points exposed to exorbitant third-party fees. How do we address these issues in the short and long run? For one, I'd say we need more #FinTech intermediaries to perform Do-It-For-You account creation, navigation and management functions.
DIFY Beats DIY
It would be great to see some sort of fiduciary-on-the-blockchain service develop - someone register fiducoin.io. Manually spreading out the fiat-to-crypto conversion across many different entry points would minimize both the technical and economic bottlenecks going forward and allow more conversion firms to compete with the major exchanges.
What do you folks think? Are you aware of any blockchain fiduciaries already? Which service do you use to move from fiat to crypto?