Crowdholding Helps Businesses Grow with Blockchain Technology

In this competitive world, where technology and innovation are advancing every day, it is imperative that businesses adapt to the new and modernized technology to keep up. Right from startups to well-established businesses, technology is a must. Blockchain is one such dimension of technology that is evolving and aiding businesses grow and thrive these days. While there are many companies today who have recognized the importance of blockchain, Crowdholding (CH) is one them who helps in solving business challenges. Crowdholding is building a platform that connects businesses with the crowd by leveraging the Blockchain technology. It is an open innovation platform where the community and businesses meet to innovate and find solutions to problems. Initiated in 2016, Crowdholding focusses on integrating more blockchain in their application. Put together in this article is a brief of their marvelous journey, future goals of advancing blockchain and a few interesting insights from the expert himself, Ethan Clime, CEO and Founder of Crowdholding.

How Did it All Start

The idea for Crowdholding came about around February, 2016. Initially, the vision was based off sweat equity/future revenue in which stakeholders in the form of a crowd would contribute labor as a non-financial investment in a company. But Ethan came across a few problems, namely a lack of transparency on the part of participating businesses, fears that venture capitalists would reject the model, and an overly broad focus for the company. Then came the Cryptocurrency Boom, which revealed a possible fit within the blockchain industry. Moving into blockchain narrowed Crowdholding’s focus. At the same time, businesses in the crypto industry must be almost 100% transparent to be successful, and they are also closely aligned with the concept of sharing an asset for work. These three things made the crypto market a perfect match for Crowdholding.

“It wasn’t easy, directly after the ICO (January 2018), the Crypto bubble popped, and it was almost like losing assets over night. We had to decrease our budget and team and bucker down for the Crypto Winter as a survival tactic while continuously building the product. Since the Dapp market has taken a huge hit, we are a surviving member of that, which has started to be one of the causes creating the new growth within our Dapp.”, says Ethan.

Serving their Clients with Excellency

On the startup side, Crowdholding presents opportunities for businesses to activate, engage, and convert customers by tapping into the wisdom of the crowd. To be able to publish on Crowdholding, a project or media contributor needs to purchase YUPs which then get rewarded to the users as a bounty reward for the task. In addition, YUP is a utility, but also represents a revenue share where, 50% of revenue goes to users who earn YUPs on CH. The more you collaborate on CH, the more assets you get as a user. Along with YUPs as a reward, projects who have their own cryptocurrency can place an additional reward of their asset. CH takes 10% cuts of all token reward transactions that goes from the project to the user. In addition, some clients pay them for additional support to help create the most engaging tasks for their CH users.

Crowdholding’s goal is to begin integrating more blockchains within their app. Currently, they are finishing up integration with Aeternity, giving them two blockchains along with Ethereum. CH plans to integrate more in the future. This gives them more projects in the market to use their application, which expands their clientele.

The Expert Guide Behind the Plan

Ethan Clime, CEO and Founder of Crowdholding, worked in the AmeriCorps in his early days, and then later the Peace Corps in the Republic of Moldova where he specialized in community business development. This was a great apprenticeship for being an entrepreneur, where he was creating a projects from scratch. What Moldovans needed were jobs and that means to create local industry. Facing high unemployment, 30 percent of Moldovans work abroad and send money home, incurring fees along the way. Witnessing a countries economic hardship in this period of his life created Ethan’s interest towards cryptocurrency even further. He believed, anything that is decentralized, and which opens borders to allow people in third world countries to keep more of their money is great. They’re the ones who are hurt most by economic policies failing them.

Not long after, he was introduced to Bold, the well-known business book by Peter Diamondis and Steven Kotler. It includes a story about Henry Ford wanting to give his 1916 dividends back to employees and customers. If the company reduced the price of their vehicles, more people would drive them. If more employees could afford the cars they made with their own hands, they would become ideal brand ambassadors. This would ultimately result in a higher stock price and more value for all shareholders. Although Ford’s vision was never realized after losing a court battle from his largest shareholder, the idea formulates close to Ethan. This in a way, is what Crowdholding’s ecosystem wants to achieve to bring people closer to the businesses they love be rewarded in such a model.

Ethan is the acting CEO and founder of the company. He believes he has not yet achieved all that he has desired. “Running a business, you also learn from your mistakes and use that experience to improve. The current market is young and there are many more years ahead for Dapps to make significant progress.”, he shares.

What keeps Ethan going is he loves the work. “The industry is fascinating, and we are in the stage where we are heading towards a 95% fail rate of projects since the pop. While others see this as a reason to leave, I see it as an opportunity. My goal is to be in that 5% successful projects and I believe Crowdholding will be the right tool and fit for that. The most profitable people from the Gold Rush wasn’t the miners, it was the companies who produced the shovels. That’s how I see CH in the industry. We are a tool for community growth.”, Ethan adds.

The Vision of Crowdholding

CH built a tool for which they can connect to any blockchain. In fact, their application brings businesses within the industry close to their customers. CH is in a way a reward based Product Hunt, where you as a user earn from your comments and votes. This system is unique.

Trends are showing open innovation will be the future (especially among millennials) and the first to make these tools will go mainstream. That’s what CH is gunning for. They believe the trends from the blockchain industry regarding being fully transparent and bringing their community closer to business operations, will expand into the traditional markets as global communities will expect and demand this.

Their core company ideology is transparency: ‘When it comes to employees, clients and customers, being good, just and transparent create unity within their network and they would not trade this approach any other way.’

The Evolvement and Scope of Blockchain from CH’s View

Blockchain has evolved over the years and Crowdholding has followed the trail of success of this technology from the very beginning. The first innovation of change in blockchain happened with the invention of Smart Contracts, thanks to Ethereum. This allowed other projects to build their own token structure to be used within their application. These types of projects are known as Dapps. Dapps in a way are application plugins with a business model that uses a blockchains monetary policy system. It is right now about survival, just how internet companies survived and emerged after the DOTCOM bubble pop.

Remember, blockchain is a about extremely affordable transactions of data that are peer to peer, which significantly reduces costs to transfer assets electronically. In addition, this is more secure on the business side regarding hacks as the system is decentralized.
However, on the individual user side there are still problems that need to be solved. Currently you still need to safeguard a private key to protect funds. Losing this can be costly where you know longer have access to your account. This creates user experience problems. Solutions need to be identified to safeguard accounts.

The Future Approach of Crowdholding

Once Crowdholding has required more growth within the crypto industry, they will begin the process to expand from Crypto to other industries. Their YUP is a “credit system model” which is common within applications outside of the crypto world. The only difference is that they are connected to a blockchains where these ‘credits’ are in fact tradable and can be transmitted peer to peer. They plan to simplify the purchasing aspect of the application where clients won’t even realize they are using blockchain. That’s when Crowdholding will be able to make huge strides.

Currently their expenditures are breaking even within their business, so they are sustainable. Crowdholding’s focus is to keep growing the user base, while they prepare for a series A investment. Their application is growing despite a 0-marketing budget. It proves their community led application can grow organically, which is why it provides a cost-effective solution. “My goal is to be a leader in the reward-based application sector.”, says, the leader of the business, Ethan Clime.