We want to help equalize the cannabis industry for the average consumer and the average entrepreneur, and cryptocurrency will play a big role in our mission. As a small company, we need to find the most efficient way to scale at the lowest cost. Our roadmap in a nutshell is: 1) launch an NFT, 2) gamify our business, 2) create system of rewards for token holders, 3) implement consumer transaction systems, 4) maintain transparency, and 5) scale to become the brand in cannabis known for fair trade, social equity, and independence from corporate interests.
We’re about to deploy our first NFT collection, so the question is presented: ETH or SOL? The differences may be real but those differences might turn out to be more perceptual than anything else. The way we see it, ETH has Four Big Advantages:
- ETH has ten times the market cap of SOL, which makes it feel somehow more credible;
- With the price of ETH around thirty times that of SOL in USD, there’s a prestige attached, because long-term holders have done very well;
- Smart contracts were “invented” by Ethereum with a genius twist: they’re essentially an autonomous program that lives on the network forever by deploying both code (the logic that makes the contract work) and state (the status of the contract with regard wallets that are parties to it);
- NFTs’s popularity explosion relied on those smart contracts and today jpegs of apes (lots of them) are selling for a half million dollars apiece, making ETH the king of NFTs and making OpenSea the sea of whales.
The first one in the battlespace (in this case ETH) is the first to weather a salvo, and that helps to inform the competition that follows. SOL is drawing on lessons learned from ETH to turn those Big Four Advantages on their side and potentially become the mainstream currency for the average new user:
- A coin’s market cap matters to currency traders but not the average consumer;
- ETH seems prohibitively expensive to inexperienced crypto users, and even though you can transact in fractional quantities, 0.1, 0.01 and 0.001 ETH gets awfully confusing. With a price of around $100 today, a SOL feels like a Ben Franklin of crypto (hopefully people will speculate less on the currency itself and just use it to speculate on NFTs, so the price remains relatively stable);
- The SOL smart contract code is deployed on chain, while a record of the state is maintained by SOL user accounts (which unlike Ethereum, are more than just a wallet address reference). Although this method somewhat diminishes the “permanence and immutability” mantra of a secure blockchain, it may offer greater flexibility and ease of use for the developer.
- While NFT marketplaces for ETH-based NFTs have been around a lot longer, the big ones like OpenSea feel more like the lobby at Sotheby’s than an arcade on the boardwalk, and for many, gamification is a big part of the appeal of NFTs!
OpenSea knows that SOL has the momentum with the mainstream market, and that’s why they now list SOL NFTs. Cross-chain protocols like Polkadot will enable interactions between smart contracts riding on different blockchains, potentially making the choice in coin a matter of consumer preference. Ultimately the brands that provide IRL utility through their consumer NFTs could be big ambassadors for one coin or another.
We’ll be making an announcement in the next few days!
