We're in alpha going into beta with 2.0: Our fundamentals are great and the community is good, but everything else is mediocre or worse. With 2.0 and the referral program we should see a shift towards marketing, ease of use and documentation. But this is just as costly as core development, so either some of the front-end entrepreneurs around here manage to raise some serious funds (millions), or we need a cryptobull season making us rich enough to fund the required marketing/branding/design. Since we can neither rely on a cryptobull season, nor voters having the courage to pay for marketing/branding/design, we must pray that some genius front end entrepreneurs manage to raise the money required to make BitShares mainstream. Fortunately, this can come about by several avenues, either Cryptonomex or one of the BitShares network partners like MoonStone, CCEDK, BunkerShares or BANX (who all earn via referral fees, making them 80% owners of the network), or via independent chain licensing partners such as PeerTracks and Identabit (who all earn via share-appreciation of their respective chains).