This Could Be Yuuuge: Notable Bitcoin Cash Business Owners Launch SLP Foundation

By
C. Edward Kelso
-
SLP Foundation

TL;DR: Notable business owners within the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) ecosystem, Peter Ng, Joey Wong, and Stefan Rust, formed what they’re calling the SLP Foundation. Its mission “is to provide the needed support and resources for top-tier development, scaling, research, and community building, with the ultimate goal of making Bitcoin Cash the premiere token ecosystem to build on,” press materials claim.

Notable Bitcoin Cash Business Owners Launch SLP Foundation

Without a single doubt, Ethereum tokens are the cryptocurrency industry standard. They dominate by projects, market capitalizations, and nearly every other metric. Up until very recently, there really was no competition. Thanks to the work of James Cramer roughly two years ago, that’s beginning to change.

SLP Foundation

Cramer’s Simple Ledger Protocol (SLP) became the basis for BCH token iterations, SLP Tokens, leveraging the network’s speed, relative simplicity, and cost-effectiveness. SLP Tokens have since taken-off, spawning a bunch of endeavors, from appreciation varieties to stablecoins (there’s even rumor Tether is looking to make a substantive move in the SLP direction), to exchange listings. What’s more is they’re quite possibly blossoming at the perfect time as Ethereum’s network increasingly comes under scrutiny for over-engineering complexity, “gas” issues, crazily elaborate hacks, and creeping increases in transaction fees.

Still, a foundation model in the spirit of something like Ethereum might be just the shove SLP tokens need in terms of greater exposure. The SLP Foundation team isn’t sharing details at the moment, but outward appearances tend toward setting up what might be akin to a ConsenSys-style hub and spoke arrangement: the nascent SLP Foundation at the theoretical center, spinning off businesses and seeding worthy efforts. One important lesson learned in the Bitcoin Cash community is how developers are most effective when they’re developing rather than having to fundraise, attend business meetings, etc.

Lean in Order to Execute

Three of the men involved in the Foundation’s initial council members are well-known BCH enthusiasts, extending from a mining veteran to token entrepreneur to a business development expert. And, according to sources familiar with its rollout, the SLP Foundation will “evolve to include more voices, without losing the ability of the foundation to execute.” The emphasis, for now, is “on being lean” while encouraging open source development, more participation, and avoiding conflict of interests (for example, someone pledged substantially to the Flipstarter Bitcoin Cash Node campaign last month under the SLP Foundation name, but the team insists it was a private donation and not on behalf of the Foundation formally).

“The SLP Foundation’s primary focus is to provide open-source tools to support the rapid growth of SLP use cases,” the announcement presser explained. “We will also aim to coordinate the common interests of the open source developers working within the SLP ecosystem to foster a healthy environment for growth and innovation. We decided very early to keep the foundation team small to avoid the kind of politics that plague our ecosphere.”

Vin Armani’s Simple Ledger Postage Protocol: Enabling A True SLP Token Ecosystem On Bitcoin Cash is a project of interest for the newly formed SLP Foundation.

SLP Foundation council member Joey Wong told CoinSpice how, in addition to Non-Fungible Token (NFT) initiatives to further concepts such as staking, Vin Armani’s Simple Ledger Postage Protocol is getting a real look. “The post office was exciting because it would allow an app’s users and customers to make free token transactions or allows users to pay for transaction fees with an SLP token instead of BCH,” Wong stressed, bringing to mind an earlier reference to the “gas” problem on Ethereum. “This provides nearly phenomenal improvement to the user onboarding experience since the user does not need to first acquire BCH. Basically, SLP tokens can be sent without any use of BCH and be sold as ‘gas-less’ vs Ethereum.”

Foundations have a new emphasis this year in light of the Infrastructure Funding Plan for Bitcoin Cash (IFP) and its surrounding controversies. In response to the IFP not activating, for example, lead BCH node implementation Bitcoin ABC recently discussed the formation of a Bitcoin Cash Foundation with Haipo Yang, CEO of mining pool ViaBTC and exchange CoinEx. And while internal enthusiast politics might disagree on how to fund BCH development, clearly everyone is beginning to understand funding development is critical going forward regardless.

IFP TIMELINE THUS FAR

Bitcoin Cash

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DYOR: CoinSpice is your home for just spicy crypto things. We’re not affiliated with any cryptocurrency project or token. Each published piece is intended for information purposes only, not investment advice and not in the hope of impacting speculative markets. There are plenty of trading sites and coin-specific advocacy journals out there, we’re neither. CoinSpice strives for rigorous accuracy in our reporting. Information presented here is contingent usually on a host of factors, and the ecosystem moves fast — prices change, projects change, and at warp speed. Do your own research.

DISCLOSURE: The author holds cryptocurrency as part of his financial portfolio, including BCH.

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