Vonage Founder Jeff Pulver’s Only Problem With Blockchain

By Raghav Sawhney

For those who haven’t heard of Vonage, it is a publicly-held Internet telephony service provider, providing business and residential telecommunication services based on voice over Internet Protocol.

While speaking at the Destination Experience Visionaries Summit in Kingston, Jamaica, Jeff Pulver, one of the founders of Vonage, made some controversial statements. He so happened to say that the Blockchain technology is overhyped.

Pulver is not insane. He clears out his meaning as he explains the how the world really sees Blockchain.

“Blockchain is one of the most misunderstood technologies in the history of mankind,” Pulver said. “At its core is something many of us will never understand.”

One cannot help but agree with this statement. A lot of us lack the technical expertise to understand a technology like this. Many who claim to be blockchain experts today have never worked with the technology as extensively as they should have to call themselves experts. And when we cannot understand something fully, we either disregard it or are unable to do justice to it fully.

“We’re seeing an evolution of capital markets, Blockchain is enabling a new type of asset classes… for the first time we can create programmable securities for traditional public companies as well as private companies,” said Pulver.

Pulver accepts that blockchain facilitates a new way of recognizing, managing, and trading the massive value implicit in both public companies and private companies. Globally, that is worth $4 quadrillion dollars. Putting it on the blockchain makes it theoretically possible to trade it programmatically, perhaps via smart contracts.

However, what remains Pulver’s biggest problem with Blockchain is the complexity of it. He says “One of the biggest challenges that blockchain has is friction. It’s very, very hard, it’s too complicated. I’m waiting for the wave of innovation to change it.”

When a technology as fast growing as Blockchain is as complicated as it is, it alienates more than half the population who just cannot figure out how it works. Thus until the technology is made simpler, we’ll just have to wait.