Gu Yanxi: Thinking of the digital financial ecological business model from the development of Apple (www.blockcast.cc)

Apple’s exclusive business model does not conform to market development trends, and in the digital financial ecosystem, membership-based business organizations will develop rapidly.

Original Title: “Talking about the Organizational Form of Digital Finance Ecosystem from Apple”
Written by: Gu Yanxi, founder of the American Liyan Consulting Company, a researcher and practitioner in the blockchain and encrypted digital asset industry

Recently, Apple has just become the second company in the world with a market capitalization of over US$200 billion. But I think Apple’s development, even if it does not reach its peak today, will soon reach its peak. It is difficult for Apple to maintain its leading position in the market by operating alone. There is no doubt that Apple is a great company. It is amazing that Apple can achieve the market value it is today. However, its exclusive management model is increasingly incompatible with the development trend of the market.

A game developer recently engaged in an open confrontation with Apple. The company directly added payment functions to its games to avoid paying Apple 30% of its revenue. Apple’s measure for this is to remove the game. The two companies are therefore currently in a state of direct confrontation. In fact, the industry has been complaining about the 30% handling fee charged by Apple for a long time. But Apple still refuses to modify its policy in this regard. Thirteen years ago, when Apple started to set up this 30% handling fee, another option faced by application vendors was to pay a 50-70% handling fee to mobile phone manufacturers. Therefore, Apple’s charges are far superior to other charges in the market. Apple is therefore supported by market application developers. At that time, Apple complied with the needs of the market and provided corresponding solutions. Therefore, its business has been developed. But Apple is now more and more like the IBM it attacked in 1984.

In the encrypted digital currency industry, Apple’s policy is also very restrictive. The CEO of Coinbase recently tweeted that Apple has been very restrictive and hostile to encrypted digital currencies in the past few years. Apple’s restrictions on the application of encrypted digital currency are completely understandable. Apple is an independent business model adopted. The application of blockchain technology supports multi-party cooperation, that is, multiple parties jointly build an ecosystem on an equal basis. And such a business model is completely different from Apple’s business model. The development of such an ecosystem is not conducive to a company’s control of the entire ecosystem. Apple’s restrictions on the use of encrypted digital currencies are therefore understandable.

In the other ecology of mobile applications, the situation of the mobile application ecology based on the Android system is in sharp contrast. Since Android is open source, there is no monopoly in the mobile application market in this field, so various pricing is determined by similar service providers in the ecosystem based on market demand. Mobile applications on the Android system are therefore more diverse and have more users. The foundation and scalability of the Android ecosystem are stronger. Comparing the two ecosystems, it is obvious that Apple itself must continue to ensure its competitiveness in the market in order to maintain its appeal to application developers. Any deviation in strategy and execution will lead to a rapid ecological decline.

In the development process of digital finance based on blockchain technology, only with the support of blockchain technology and adopting a multi-party cooperation and joint operation model can we give full play to the greatest features of blockchain technology and achieve collective Maximum benefit. Such a business model will increasingly become the mainstream organizational form. In the current era when global economic activities are increasingly interconnected, every industry has a global layout. The technical basis for cooperation among participants from all parts of the industry supporting this industry must be distributed accounting technology. One of the most illustrative areas in this regard is trade finance. Once there are reasonable governance and business rules based on the support of this technology, such an ecosystem can be quickly established on a global scale, and its development speed will be faster than that of an industry based on exclusive management. Even in application scenarios such as trade finance, it is basically impossible to establish a feasible solution based on centralized technology systems and centralized organizations.

The development of the digital financial ecosystem is still in its early stages. The characteristics of the underlying blockchain technology determine the future development of its ecology. The business model in the ecology also determines the possibility of ecological development, the speed of development and the scalability. On the basis of the support of blockchain technology, business organizations organized as membership organizations can develop rapidly. While the model developed in an exclusive way may develop rapidly in the early stage due to the advantages of existing resources and industry status, it is difficult to achieve more sustainable and larger expansion. After that, it will be difficult to develop a high-value technology company based on the same model as Apple.