Quotes from William Mougayar

The old question 'Is it in the database?' will be replaced by 'Is it on the blockchain?'

For the first time, companies can be their own payment processors without the cumbersome or costly aspects of traditional financial settlement options. Tokens offer a much lower barrier for processing end-to-end transactions inside a given market.

The blockchain is custom-made for decentralizing trust and exchanging assets without central intermediaries. With the decentralization of trust, we will be able to exchange anything we own and challenge existing trusted authorities and custodians that typically held the keys to accessing our assets or verifying their authenticity.

Blockchain infiltration will be met with resistance because it is an extreme change.

Government leaders should get up to speed on the blockchain by understanding it first and committing to exploring its potential.

As we prepare to enter the cryptoconomy, undoubtedly it looks fuzzy, foggy, risky, buggy, uncertain and unproven, but so did the Internet in 1995.

Conceivably, blockchains could rely on a number of standards above the Internet's existing standards to allow a smooth bridging from one layer to another. That would be a breakthrough.

Study how to write smart contracts, which is the basic unit of programming a blockchain for business purposes. It is the equivalent of being taught HTML and Java during the early Internet days. And master how to create assets or tokenize existing ones on a blockchain.

Let's hope the Canadian public sector starts putting the blockchain on their agenda so we can see a significant difference in how government services are delivered.

ICOs cannot escape startup evolution characteristics. This means that their growth will be hard fought, hard earned, and hardly a walk in the park.

A new DAO is like a startup. It requires a product/market fit, business model realization, and a lot of users/customers.

My advice to many ICOs is to start reading about startups and focus on the product, customer, and market as soon as the sale is over. And don't get distracted by post-ICO euphoria and the price of ETH or BTC.

The blockchain start-ups that have done ICOs are just at the beginning of something. Ask me how they are doing in a year or two years from now. I know for a fact it won't be any different from the statistics of all start-ups: 80% of them will not make it.

Ideally, it is important to communicate exactly when large amounts of tokens become unlocked and therefore available in public exchanges. It is a good practice to continuously update these exchanges with the right amount of tokens in circulation.

In order to grow-up, blockchains will eventually need a lot of standards that are vendor- and solutions-agnostic. So many areas are ripe for standards developments: smart contracts, tokens, security, storage, messaging, identities, naming, record-keeping, and more.

An aftermath of real failures can make the whole blockchain ecosystem more resilient because it will result in revealing the boundaries and realities of what's possible, useful, absurd, impossible, repeatable, and scalable out of everything that appears plausible and innovative at the beginning.

Just like paying a toll to use a freeway, the token can be the pay-per-use rail for getting on the blockchain infrastructure or for using the product. This also ensures that users have skin in the game.

If you have your own currency, you have your own governance, so each currency becomes their own mini-government. Mini-government is a big word, but it's a body that is governed in a decentralized manner where users have a say, where there's oversight and transparency.

The token itself is not your new business model. What the token enables for you and for your users is the key part to focus on.

Until there are tangible metrics for quantifying the real value of a token's utility, the gap between value and valuation will continue to defy conventional wisdom and conventional valuation methods.

If your user base engagement is fledgeling, a token may not be the panacea unless it is properly threaded into the product, and user behavior is accompanying the token utility.

I'm looking forward to seeing more ICO projects provide increased clarity about the performance metrics expectations they plan to exhibit during their future adult lives in addition to the assumptive utility of that token they are selling.

If blockchain technologies ignore the eventuality of standards, we are going to see less adoption. Maybe we should think of the blockchain as a public-good utility and encourage an evolution that is not unlike the Internet's in terms of openness and neutrality of access.

In the increasingly digital world, data is a valuable currency, yet as consumers, we control and own little of it. As consumers, we must ask what big companies do with our data, a question directed to both the online and traditional ones.