The Emerging Tech Startups We’re Having Our Gen Z Team Members Stalk: Part 9

Sooo… you know when we talked about what will be driving emerging tech startups this year and next? We broke down DARQ? So that’s here if you need a refresher; but basically we’ve got new technology on top of this in this week’s ep of “Not Sponsored, Just Stalking” that perfectly builds off of all that jargon and all those predictions, this time in FinTech.

You’re right, it does sound like a messy conglomerate of blockchain meets AI meets UX and XR and edge systems and whatever other tech keywords you want to throw in there. But that’s 2020/21 for you.

Beautiful Open-Source Chaos

This week, we found Ethereum. They describe themselves as, “the best portal to Ethereum for our growing global community.” But since that doesn’t really tell us anything, and navigating their site is like trying to find one cohesive “What We Do” on GitHub, here’s what we gathered:

Ethereum is a “kind” of internet, except one where payments are built in, with its own cryptocurrency, with no singular regulators or data mining (distributed), and run by its own community members. Some of that is familiar to when you first learned about BitCoin, and some from when you first learned about distributed ledger technology, yes? We’re not being totally foreign here.

It’s essentially an internet where users own their own data and apps, everyone has access to the open financial system, and you can build anything you want on the neutral, open-access infrastructure.

It’s Programmable Blockchain

“The Ethereum community is the largest and most active blockchain community in the world. It includes core protocol developers, cryptoeconomic researchers, artists, cypherpunks, mining organizations, ETH holders, gamers, app developers, grandmothers, anarchists, fortune 500 companies, and, as of now, you.”

What this (something like Ethereum cropping up just in the last year [technically launched 2015 but didn’t have a ‘stable release’ until January 2020]) shows us is just how READY the market is for even newer technology than we see with DARQ. The market is full of people already teaching themselves how to use what is apparently the new era of the internet. I guess what else should we have expected from the generations that taught themselves how to code their own video games before they got to high school?

The Only Time EVER We’ll Say “Underestimate Yourself”

The smartest thing you can do right now in the wake of the **** show that has been 2020, is overestimate how much keeping up you have to do. Whether you’re an angel investor, a marketing or branding expert, a growth hacking agency, a writer, an entrepreneur… acknowledge that in the world where social justice Zillennials and quantum computing makes strides in the same week, nothing relying on “this is how we’ve always done it” will make it, let alone stand out. Underestimate how well the status quo will continue working. If you just finished figuring out what FinTech looks like, Ethereum just changed it again.

Keep your eye on the emerging tech startups and the fact that unicorn startups have never been more possible, albeit more competitive. As a top brand builder marketing group, we know we’re not the expert in your field, we’re the expert in making your thing in your field be the top thing. We’ve been doing this for a decade (to put that into perspective, in 2010 iPhones were still being adopted). So we’re used to keeping up, and acknowledging that we can’t do it perfectly. We just want to make sure you’re ready too.

Because Ethereum is redefining the internet as we know it, and no one really knew the internet in the first place. Hop on, no one is slowing down for you.

Sincerely, your friendly and odd neighborhood brand builders who have only ever seen the world through the future-proof lens.