CEO Of Overstock Expects A Blockchain Products Market In 2019

Jonathan Johnson, who is the CEO of Overstock, is in the blockchain events today, this time for sharing his optimistic views towards the field of blockchain. The current president of Overstock.com and the Medici Ventures has described the blockchain-focused venture fund’s goals for 2019.

As he said:

“People often say that ‘blockchain will change the world with dot-dot-dot.’ Now everybody needs to figure out what ‘dot-dot-dot’ is, and build it.”

Johnson also said that the focus of the coming year “should change from coming up with new ideas to executing on those ideas.”

It is easy to see that Overstock is aiming high when it comes to blockchain, especially when seeing its $175 million in investments from the Medici portfolio companies which includes companies such as the security token trading platform tZERO, the tech provider Symbiont, the voting app Voatz, the lending startup Ripio, the data managing platform Factom and others.

Even though it all started with Medici being an investment arm, the focus is to go big on blockchain in the years to come. As Johnson revealed:

“We want our portfolio companies to focus on having their products in production. When you have a product, it starts to open up the creative juices, [people start] asking ‘how we can use it’ and it changes the discussion. When it’s mostly about technology, people want to talk about the Merkle tree, mining, nonces… All that talk gets confusing and in the way of progress.”

Medici’s chief operating officer also agreed on this, stating the company’s narrative in his own words:

“We need to do more than just explain what blockchain applications can be,” he said in an interview. “We need to show people how amazing blockchain is by launching blockchain products. When people can use a product, they are half the way up the learning curve of what blockchain is.
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And now they actually care how it works.”

Noting that the US government is the “biggest middleman” in the country right now, Medici’s head believes that the regulatory environment can be changed step to step.

“If you look at travel agents and the internet — we didn’t get rid of them overnight, we just showed that they are less and less useful for us. So, we take incremental steps in this way, we see the middlemen less necessary, we see the regulation maybe unnecessary, and we get to a point when everybody can agree with it,” the CEO Johnson concluded.