We have prepared a review of the projects that the Bitcoin industry requires right now. These projects have no strong competitors in the market and could attract a lot of new cryptocurrency owners.

Angels, funds and private investors will willingly invest their money in such projects. We offer to choose more simple, profitable and less risky way.

The market of cryptocurrency projects is rapidly changing, and the products which were up-to-date a few years ago, are not interesting for the target audience any more.

Strong leaders settled in the most profitable segments of the market (mining, trading, e-commerce), and nobody can move them unless they have a budget of more than one million, genius idea and a great deal of luck.

We all know how difficult it is to find a good idea for a startup and to configure the product which meets requirements of clients and corresponds to ideas of investors about what a profitable investment is.

From the general to the special: solutions for local markets

Non-competitive conditions and interested local investors are very attractive factors for a startup. The main thing is that you do not need to reinvent the wheel. Just take a successful global product, adapt it to a certain local market and proceed with its expansion.

A good example of such product is the Indonesian cryptocurrency exchange market Bitcoin.co.id. The currency pair BTC/IDR (Indonesian Rupiah) is actively traded on this exchange market, and pay-in/pay-out of fiat money is available via popular local payment systems and banks.

The project is fairly successful which is proved by the number of users and daily turnover. Also, Bitcoin.co.id gains extra profit from currency exchange offices and ATMs which it opened in Indonesia. There one can convert cryptocurrency into cash or buy bitcoins.

While the Indonesian market has already been captured (let’s wish good luck and prosperity to the owners of Bitcoin.co.id) and is not attractive to those who want to launch their own exchange market, the other local markets are still available.

For example, in the UAE, there is only a currency exchange office opened in 2014, but no exchange market.

As judged by the activity of Asian and Arab investors in various startups and resources like Angel.co, their interest in cryptocurrency projects is very high. The most active investors are from China and Singapore.

Representatives of these countries are happy to invest substantial sums of money to Bitcoin projects.

We are talking not only about products for traders. Any global solution adapted for the local market can draw their attention.

Bringing Bitcoin into the masses: cryptocurrency promotion projects

The world where bitcoins are commonly used by American housewives, souvenir sellers from India and workers of German factories is a dream of all companies in Bitcoin industry.

In such circumstances, the Bitcoin exchange rate will increase rapidly causing the growth of Bitcoin owners’ capital, and cryptocurrency projects will gain hordes of new users which will result in a substantial growth of profits.

Big companies and funds are ready to invest millions of dollars into a product which can turn Bitcoin into a popular payment instrument. And what is left to do is to invent a good idea for popularization of cryptocurrency and bring it to life.

The field of activity is fairly wide. Here are some areas to think about:

  • Libraries of knowledge, User Guides and Manuals, or training programs which can easily explain to a common person what Bitcoin is, what is it required for and how to use it.
  • Technology and hardware solutions which make transactions and payments in bitcoins handy, easy and profitable for people.
  • Popular services for remote work, marketing of goods and services paid in bitcoins, and solutions for integration of Bitcoin payments into current major products which work with micropayments (such as Uber).
  • Cryptocurrency transfer services with favorable fees.

These are just a few obvious areas. But if you can find an unusual solution for popularization of cryptocurrency, you have all chances to earn millions and to cooperate with major investors.

Blockchain scalability challenge

Despite the potential of and prospects of blockchain, at this stage the network cannot meet the demand of global commerce.

For example, 47,000 transactions per second are conducted through VISA payment network, whereas Bitcoin blockchain supports only 7 transactions with a block limited to 1 MB in size.

It is possible to increase the number of transactions by removing a limit on the block size. But in this case, we will face another problem: if 300 bytes (on average) are used to conduct 1 transaction (without any block size limits) and the bandwidth load is equivalent to VISA’s (47,000 transactions per second), the average block size will be about 8 Gb.

Such block must be sent in the network approximately each 10 minutes. It turns to more than 400 terabytes of data per year.

So, increase of the number of transactions within the network up to the scale of VISA’s network will cause collapse or strong centralization of the network, since no home PC of a common user can provide network capacity and storage of such volume of data.

There is no doubt, that a person or a group of people who can solve the problem of scalability will receive support from investors. In fact, this task is directly related to popularization of Bitcoin and its use as a global payment instrument.

Now the world’s best minds are trying to solve this challenge. Not so long ago American developers offered the Lightning technology, but Lightning Bitcoin Network is still in the process of implementation and, as per rumors, the developers have faced a number of serious problems.

Solution to the problems of mining

The difficulty of the network grows, Chinese manufacturers of chips get bigger and better and mining payoffs decrease.

Top-managers of the companies engaged in Bitcoin mining and production of miners lose their sleep while dreaming of a talented engineer who will come and bring them a new chip prototype which would substantially outperform all existing products.

Projects and solutions aimed at reducing maintenance costs (miners’ power consumption, maintenance and replacement of equipment) also attract a great interest.

If you are a guru of hardware startups capable to solve the above challenges, there will be no end of people wanting to buy your solution. And then you will only need to choose an investor and a villa in California.

Tools for traders

Perhaps, Bitcoin traders are the most active and largest user group in the world of cryptocurrencies.

Statistics show that more than 95% of coin owners are registered on at least one exchange and they have conducted at least one exchange transaction on it.

Needs of Bitcoin traders are far from being met:

  • There is a lack of powerful analytical instruments for in-depth analysis on Exchange markets. Even BitcoinWisdom covers far from all exchanges, cryptocurrencies and trade pairs and has a number of defects.
  • There is no single product (aggregator) which would allow simultaneous trading on several exchanges, gathering statistics and analyzing situation.
  • The market of user-friendly analytical instruments for mobile devices is almost empty.

It’s not hard to gather requirements for analytical projects, which the market needs, just read discussions on traders’ forums and question the target audience.

The most important thing in implementation of such project is to have regular consultations with traders (or, better to hire 1 or 2 consultants) to avoid the outcome of many startups when the final product is far from the actual needs of the target audience, being made by programmers for programmers.

This article was created in collabration with hashflare.com

By Egor Kotkin