Blockchains LLC—the mysterious company that bought more than 67,000 acres in Sparks, Nevada—would like you to know that it is absolutely, positively, without a doubt, “done waiting.” And, for some unclear reason, it has placed a Mad Max-influenced tween in the middle of the desert to really drive that message home.
“Adults like to tell me about the future,” the intense girl in the video explains, dressed in a vaguely futuristic black blouse and wristband. “New technologies like blockchain will change the world for the better. Trust won’t be implied. It will be guaranteed.”
She is drawing in the sand, and seems remarkably chill about being left in the middle of a desolate wasteland with only a stick. “It all sounds great,” she says, as the dramatic score intensifies. “There’s only one problem: I don’t want to wait.”
(Um, us neither, abandoned desert child. But that’s the thing about notoriously complex emergent technologies: They take time to build.)
The ad, shared earlier this week, is meant to hype CEO Jeffrey Berns and President David Berns’s “Global Launch” announcement at DevCon IV on November 1, when we, the general public, can also theoretically be done waiting—at least to figure out exactly what the hell this is all about, anyway.
The mysterious nature of Blockchains seems to be intentional. The startup generated plenty of buzz with its 2017 land purchase in the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center. (The center is also home to Tesla Gigafactory 1, Google, and Switch.) And, though it’s unclear what the company plans to do with most of the land, in June, it showed off new 25,000 square-foot offices to local reporters.
There’s impressively little detail about the company’s plans on its website, either. It does, however, offer no shortage of sweeping statements about how determined Blockchains is “to lead the way in realizing new ideas, new perspectives, new potential and new ways to live that will make the way everyone lives better.”
What we do know: The company claims it will focus on “financial services, trusted identity solutions and distributed application (Dapp) software for the Ethereum blockchain.” Their tag line? “You’ve never seen a sandbox like this.” News site ETHNews also describes itself as an “independent subsidiary” of Blockchains. So that’s something.
Of course, many blockchain startups have a hard time explaining to the public what they’re about. So it’s an interesting strategy to basically skip that step all together. That can only get you so far, though. Eventually you have to explain what you do, and then—ideally—actually do something. Perhaps the November 1 launch will give us more clarity on whether or not Blockchains is up for that challenge.