What do Tixl, Intel and CISCO have in common?

Diego Quast / Tixl Buster
8 min readAug 20, 2021

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What do you know about CISCO and Intel?

If you have traded stock in NASDAQ, I’m sure you already heard about both companies and you do know that both are amongst the biggest names in the technology industry.

For people who are not familiar with technology or NASDAQ, it will be harder to understand what these companies are, but I’ll try to help you: have you ever seen a sticker on some computers, “Intel inside”? What does that mean?

Ok. Let me try to explain what these companies have in common with Tixl.

Intel and CISCO

I like to think that Intel is for computers just as CISCO is for the internet. What does Intel produce? They produce the computer’s heart, the CPU (central processing unit). The company was founded in the late 1960s and is worth about $80billion today. Intel is not the only CPU producer in the world. There is at least one other big global player in this arena: AMD.

Ask yourself: when you buy a computer and you are comparing 2 different models, which one seems to be better: the one with “Intel inside” or “the other one”? Which one is more expensive? Why?

Do you buy computers from Intel? No. Intel doesn’t produce computers. HP, Dell, Lenovo and other companies do. They buy the CPU from Intel (and the other company too) and build their computers to sell to you.

How about CISCO? What does this company produce?

CISCO produces all the devices that make the computers “talk” to each other on the internet. These devices are called routers. CISCO was born in Stanford University when the founders managed to build something that made it possible to connect 2 different networks in different buildings in the University.

They noticed that there were many different networks, and if they wanted to connect all the computers, they needed a router that was able to “speak” all those different languages so the computers could talk to each other. Multiply this concept by a few million and you have the internet. People in general don’t know what CISCO produces but it is fair to say that more than 60% of all internet traffic goes thru their products.

Just like Intel, CISCO also has competitors — the most famous one might be Huawei, a Chinese company that had some problems with the US government a few years ago.

You might be asking yourself: what does this have to do with Tixl?

As I said, in my opinion, Intel is for computers just as CISCO is for the internet and Tixl will be for the cryptoverse.

What do Intel, CISCO and Tixl have in common?

It is not easy to understand what their product is or what it does.

Sure. Everybody can easily understand what a CPU is, today. But I guarantee that was not the case 60 years ago, and it was quite hard to explain to the average person what a computer was at that time. Imagine having to explain what a CPU was and how a company that manufactured these things could be worth billions of dollars.

The same for CISCO: in the mid 1980s, the average person didn’t have any idea of computer networks. If they didn’t know computer networks, how would they understand the communication problem between different networks? How would you explain to someone, in the early 1990s, that he should invest $1,000 in CISCO and that he would become rich because of that? At its peak in 2000, CISCO’s market cap hit more than US$500 billion.

All that said, here is the question: what is Tixl’s product? What does it do? Try to explain that to someone and convince him to buy $1,000 worth of $TXL because that could make him rich.

Business to Business — Their products aren’t sold to the public

Once you understand what Intel’s and CISCO’s products are, it is clear that their biggest clients are not the public in general but big companies:

  1. Intel — Dell, HP, Lenovo, Apple, Acer and others
  2. CISCO — telecom companies in general like: AT&T, Verizon, Telefonica and others

Once you understand that Tixl’s product is not the TXL token but the Autobahn, you will understand why Tixl’s marketing should focus on partners and not the public in general.

As partners use their products, they bring more clients

The computers that Dell sold, with “Intel inside” had huge sales. That made even more people want to buy computers, which made Dell order more CPUs from Intel. And that was followed by many other computer manufacturing companies. In the end, everybody was buying CPUs from the same supplier: Intel.

Telecom companies saw huge opportunities in making the internet available to more and more people. The more people they brought in, the more infrastructure they needed in order to provide good service to their clients. Then they wanted more speed… all that lead to “need to buy more products from CISCO”.

The same for Tixl: imagine Schnitzelswap connected to the Autobahn and being able to do swaps 100x faster than Uniswap and at 90% discount. Who would run this campaign? Schnitzelswap or Tixl? Schnitzel of course, and the result would be much more traffic going thru the Autobahn and, how does Tixl make money? Yes! Charging fees for the use of the Autobahn.

Interoperability!

I’m not able to trace a parallel between Intel and Tixl using the Interoperability subject, but I can surely trace it between CISCO and Tixl.

As I mentioned in the beginning of this text, CISCO was born when the founders were able to make 2 computer networks communicate between themselves. Their genius was to notice how many different networks could exist in the world and what kind of problem that could be. Their product would make it possible for computers in different places and networks to act as if they were in the same network.

How many different blockchain networks do we have in the world today? Many, right? How is communication between the different networks? Do we need them to communicate between them? Does Tixl have a solution for this?

Marketing to the public will help

Intel started their “Intel inside” marketing campaign many years ago (I recall having seen this for the first time in the early 1990s). Why? Because that makes people favor computers that use their products and justifies a premium price.

CISCO doesn’t have a campaign to the public in general but, instead, they have a company that sells their products with another brand: Linksys.

It would be nice to have projects like Schnitzelswap writing in their site something like “Powered by Tixl”. That is something small that, with time could become a huge differential, especially when the true Tixl competitors appear.

The differences I found between Intel, CISCO and Tixl

The revenue model

The biggest difference I found when comparing Intel, CISCO and Tixl is on how their revenue is generated. Intel’s and CISCO’s revenue are quite simple to understand because they sell an actual physical product. Tixl, however, sells a service: the use of the Autobahn (ok, and the Cross-Chain Bridge).

In fact, in my opinion, the revenue stream generated by the Autobahn is something that CISCO and Intel would envy because it will generate recurring revenue for many years to come while their products, once they are sold, that’s it: their sales forces have to put a lot of effort to sell again and again and again. I’m pretty sure that all companies are trying to figure out a way to turn the product sales into some kind of recurring service.

Imagine how much money CISCO would make if they were able to charge a fee for every 1GB of information that went through their products. Well, that is exactly what will happen to Tixl and the Autobahn.

Intel and CISCO have stocks that are traded, Tixl has the TXL token.

As Intel and CISCO sold their products, they would report their results to the market and, based on that, their stocks would go up or down. Stock represents company ownership. If you have a significant amount of common stock, you might be able to help define the company’s strategy.

The TXL token is not stock. It is not a product. Tixl is the token that powers the Autobahn and it is the only token that will be transferred at absolutely no fees in the Autobahn. Just like anything that is worth anything, it has value if people believe it has value and the team is doing a lot to make it valuable:

  1. By making it scarce — buying TXL tokens in the market to distribute to stakers, and burning tokens too;
  2. By making TXL the only token that “travels” for free — every other token will have to pay a fee to be transferred on the Autobahn. When people discover that they can send money to other people at zero cost, why wouldn’t they want to buy TXL? This, combined with the scarcity will make it very valuable.

If you want to know more about “What is Tixl?”, please read this other article where I discuss it in much more detail.

Could I compare the TXL token to CISCO’s stock?

In my opinion, yes. Technically, however, I must say that cryptocoins are not considered securities and, therefore, TXL is not a stock, but keep this in mind: as transactions are done in the Autobahn and the Cross-Chain Bridge, they generate revenue. This revenue is then used to buy TXL tokens from the market which makes their price go up. The TXL tokens that are bought are then distributed to stakers and some are burned which also reduces supply, making them more valuable.

Stakers are happy (or not) with their return by staking their tokens. If they are happy, they keep their tokens locked which makes them increase in value because Tixl is going to buy and burn more tokens again soon (since their products are generating more revenue). If they aren’t happy (or they think they will make more money by selling their tokens), they will sell them and who will happily buy them? Yes, Tixl, with the proceeds of their products.

You might have heard about companies that buy their own stock back. Warren Buffet is a huge fan of companies that do that because that makes them more expensive. Tixl will buy their own tokens back.

I think it is important for all of us to understand the differences between the TXL token and Tixl’s products. The confusion I’ve seen is people thinking that the TXL token is Tixl’s product and to say that would be equivalent to say that CISCO’s or Intel’s stocks are their products.

All that said, it doesn’t hurt anyone to see the TXL token getting some marketing. When stocks are launched in an IPO, they also are marketed as products.

If you found this article interesting and you want to invest in TXL, contact me. I can help you:

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