Crypto has become popular in the recent years, but we are still far away from mass adoption. And despite the Bitcoin whitepaper being published 12 years ago, most of the people are not familiar with this ground-breaking technology. If you read this article, you're one of the few who are interested in blockchain. 

And while 2020 was the year of DeFi, and lot of people got interested in Bitcoin, Ethereum and other coins and tokens, true adoption is years away. 

The way I see, for most people crypto will be useful, when crypto becomes a safe, secure and fast way to do micro transactions. When it will be possible to pay for your coffee with crypto, when you can order UberEats or buy something on Amazon. And it will be just as fast as Visa, will be safe and when you'll get more benefit with paying a cryptocurrency. 

Bitcoin unfortunately is not suitable for this role. While it's the most commonly known and adopted money, it's not ideal for micropayments as it's slow (6 confirmation takes one hour) and has fees. It is perfect for transferring large amounts internationally, but not for everyday transactions. 

Ethereum is programmable money and has fantastic applications (think of the whole DeFi ecosystem), but gas fees might be extraordinary and it's also relatively slow (well, ETH 2.0 might bring some great improvements).

There are a few projects that provide fee-less, fast and secure transactions, but for some reasons they are under-marketed and not as well known to the community. 

One of my favourites is NANO (https://nano.org/), using an innovative block-lattice data structure, but it lacks of marketing and doesn't seem to have a lot of activity with exchanges nor with the community. Its meme-focused fork, Banano (https://banano.cc/) has a more active community (and while it's a non-serious, non-commercial version of Nano, the underlying technology would be actually suitable for high volume, free and fast transactions). Have a look at this short video that was recently published by Nano: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwA69AEThrQ

Nimiq (https://www.nimiq.com/) is another project that I keep an eye on, but after a lot of YouTube videos by crypto influencers, the hype got a bit quiet. Maybe its move from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake will get more adoption. 

As crypto is booming again, all of these projects have a chance now to make it big, but I think they would need to invest both in technology (what they're usually good at) and both in marketing (getting them known to the market, the exchanges). 

What other projects do you think can be groundbreaking for mass adoption? 

(Thumbnail art by https://twitter.com/rogerbrownart)