Forbes says 2017 has been a breakout year for crypto with a mind-bending appreciation of cryptocurrencies, transaction volumes for Bitcoin increasing 100x (in USD) from what they were at the beginning of the year, and appearance countless new blockchain projects. I’d say it’s just the beginning of the crypto expansion to the multi-trillion dollar markets, that will be led by less volatile asset tokens.
Last summer, a research estimating that the total cryptocurrencies capitalization can exceed $5 trillion by 2025, and this number already seems conservative — the market is growing faster than we expected.
To illustrate, they estimated that the market cap would reach $400 billion by the end of 2018, but the latest news about major exchanges launching futures on bitcoin and the growing interest from institutional investors towards cryptocurrencies speeded up the growth, so we already have $600+ billion market cap.
Crypto capitalization in 2017
I believe that in 2018 volatility of the crypto market can increase even more, as the rapid capitalization growth of late 2017 was not yet accompanied by a similar growth of the number of crypto wallets.
However, the long-term trend stays: the crypto market will grow exponentially within next 5–7 years mostly thanks to the high adoption rate of cryptocurrencies, just like those of the cell phones and the Internet. The advantages the blockchain provides, like the ease of cross-border transactions, low transaction costs and security, are huge, and we estimate that the number of bitcoin wallets alone will double next year reaching record 40 million wallets.
Moreover, the institutional investors, from hedge funds to family offices and VCs, and high-net-worth individuals are getting more and more serious about the crypto. Some central banks, for example in Russia and Japan, are planning to issue a full central-backed cryptocurrency that will be fungible against BTC and the leading cryptos. And others announced plans for holding digital currencies starting next year.
2018 is the year for crypto to go up even further!
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