Blockchain and crypto trends for 2018 and beyond

BLOCKCHAIN AND CRYPTO TRENDS

BY PETER L. MCGREW

2018 & BEYOND

"Every informed person needs to know about Bitcoin because it might be one of the world’s most important developments.”

- Leon Luow

www.TheOnlineCryptoSummit.com

Preface During the first edition of The Online Crypto Summit I met with over 25 industry makers and insiders who shared their experiences, thoughts and visions on what seems to be the next technological, economical and social impact revolution. In this report I highlighted the trends for 2018 and beyond as seen through the eyes of the speakers at the summit. Enjoy!

Viktoriya Petrova Co-founder & Host www.TheOnlineCryptoSummit.com

2018 will be a transition year. Regulations worldwide will cool off the hype around ICOs and help in this way clear the space from scams and bad projects based on hype with no real use cases for the technology.

We will see rise in institutional investments but it will still be possible for small individual investors to participate in projects. We will see more clear differentiation between utility and security tokens.

Percentage of successful ICOs will continue to rise as we will start seeing standardization in the ICO process and more and more selfregulations coming from the ICO founding teams. We will see better governance and funds distribution in successfully funded ICOs. We will see more projects adopting decentralized governance as a model.

We will see more and more maturity and collaborations between projects in the space. There will no longer be a competition for becoming THE blockchain or THE cryptocurrency, instead companies already start realizing that there is so much white space and room for development that the best thing to do is to collaborate and grow together.

We will see a rise in utility tokens, meaning that more and more projects will create their token economy around an actual use case of their token within their product/service offering. In the next couple of years creating your own token will be as easy as working with a wordpress visual editor.

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Real estate tokens will become a thing by the end of the year, allowing people to own small portions of real estate assets around the world through tokens.

More and more social impact project will come out. Industry will not be just about payments anymore but will also shift towards giving value to measurable social input. We will see capital investments moving into impact tokens as a separate asset class.

We will see decoupling from the value of Bitcoin, meaning that the market will become more distributed and the price movement of bitcoin will not affect as much the price movement of other crypto currencies and tokens.

We’ll see another up-cycle in the market by the end of the year with growing communities and the scaling solutions currently in development kick in.

Regulations slowly unlock conservatively invested capital (cash whales capital) and prep the way for its investment into coin market caps.

There is huge room for market growth - the total market cap of the entire blockchain industry today is still about $250 billion which is less than the market cap of a single commercial entity like Apple, Amazon etc.

We could see an unprecedented crypto market growth in 2018 reaching the trillion dollar mark and surpassing it.

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More and more governments will start looking into implementation of blockchain technology, this could provide for more transparent transactions and at the same time provide the infrastructure for mainstream cryptocurrency adoption.

We will keep seeing a lot of cryptocurrency adoption in countries with unstable fiat money and that will further test out real-world use cases.

More and more major corporations such as Cisco, IBM, UPS, Walmart etc, will transition from research and development to actually implementing the blockchain technology within enterprise services

Blockchain-backed transparency could become the norm in supply chains over the next few years.

Over the next few years the majority of end users will not even be aware that they are transacting through a blockchain because the user experience and ease of use will evolve to a point that blockchain will just be running in the background.Â

1% of retail payments to be in crypto by end of 2018 and easily up to 5% by end of 2019. 3 to 5 years from now, as liquidity is created within the token networks, the larger and larger institutional payments will happen through crypto on the blockchain to save cost and speed up transactions.Â

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A lot lot new protocol variations are coming out, aiming to resolve different trade-off imbalances such as proof of work scalability, inter-blockchain connections, security and speed of transactions.

In the next few years blockchain will completely transform business and how they operate. We will see more and more tokenizing of assets and more open global movement of funds. It will become increasingly easy to invest your trust in startups around the world, which could create new services with multitude of operators, instead of a few major organizations providing these services.

We will see more integration between blockchain and IoT sensors, which could give transparency in data generation and exchange, with Dubai already taking the lead and setting a precedent on a government level through the Smart Dubai project.

We will slowly transition to owning our personal data and records through blockchain instead of giving it away to large, centralised entities and trust them with how they use it.Â

As the growth of adoption continues to rise we will see the need for cross-blockchain connectivity and transfer of data.

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