Report | Top Ten Trends in the Cryptographic Industry

Article source: Bitcoinist

Author: Christina Comben

Translator: Planet Daily Azuma

Original title: "The front line of the planet | One article summarizes the top ten trends of the current industry"

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On November 12th, London-based digital asset management company CoinShares released a 134-page Crypto Trends report. The report, co-authored by the company's chief investment officer, Meletem Demirors, and manager Marty Stenson, explores some of the most important trends in the industry today. Overseas cryptocurrency media Bitcoinist selected the main content of the report (the full report on page 134 can be downloaded here ).

As CoinShares wrote at the beginning – "When knowledge is shared, it is the best." In order to consolidate the development of the industry, industry insiders and external analysts must be able to identify, collect and analyze data to tell why the industry is important. At present, what are the top ten trends in the cryptocurrency industry? The answers given by CoinShares are as follows.

Trend 1: The macro trend "set up"

The report first reviews how we got to where we are today. It seems that a combination of a series of macro trends is helping Bitcoin set off a "storm."

In 2019, the gap between the rich and the poor is growing. The total assets of Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos exceed the total assets held by the lowest income 50% of Americans.

At the same time, the degree of automation in the field of work is increasing, political tensions and turmoil in countries such as Iran and Venezuela are intensifying, and social resistance to capitalism and large technology companies is also increasing.

At the same time, people's trust in banks and governments is also decreasing. CoinShares said that "more than 90% of people think their government is corrupt to some extent."

While these external pressures appear to be not directly related to the encryption field, these macro trends are working together to “build the stage” for Bitcoin performances.

Trend 2: Hype rests, the market is mature

In other words – blockchain technology is becoming more and more boring among the general public. We have witnessed the transformation of this technology from emergence to madness to maturity.

The search volume for "bitcoin" and "blockchain" declined. Gartner, a well-known research firm, believes that most blockchain applications don't have any meaningful impact for at least five to ten years, which puts us in a “bubble bottom” period.

• Remarks: Since 1995, Gartner has divided the mature process of a technology into five stages according to its professional analysis, prediction and inference of the mature evolution speed of various new technologies and the time required to reach maturity. The valley period is the third stage.

The number of conferences has been reduced overall, and overall investment has decreased, but as blockchain/cryptocurrency begins to mature as an industry, construction continues.

Trend 3: Institutional Admission

This is one of the most obvious trends we have seen in the past few years – the transition from consumer to institutional.

Specific signs of this shift include the emergence of lending markets and infrastructure for institutional investors in addition to autonomous hosting solutions, exchanges and wallets, as exemplified by BlockFi and Bakkt.

In addition, traditional financial institutions such as TD Ameritrade, Fidelity, Bloomberg and Square are entering the field.

Trend 4: From “decentralization” to “centralization” (this is very unexpected)

The CoinShares report believes that supporting decentralization may be just an illusion. It even claims that "nothing is decentralized," including bitcoin – as bitcoin companies increasingly focus on institutional adoption, more and more bitcoins will be managed by regulated entities.

In addition, “monitored funds will come soon” – more and more companies are entering the field through their “cryptocurrency” to track and track our financial trends.

Trend 5: Large ICOs perform poorly

The top ten ICOs raised more than $8 billion, but their performance was less than expected. More than half of the projects failed to go to the market or have completely withdrawn from the market.

This trend indicates that no investment is guaranteed. Although ICOs and STOs seem to be dead, the report also points out that the performance of the IPO market is not much better.

Trend 6: Stabilizing the currency outbreak

The explosive growth of stable currencies is one of the most obvious trends in the encryption industry. The innovation of stable currency effectively makes the blockchain a settlement network. However, although the market value of the stable currency has doubled, the USDT still retains 80% of the market.

Trend 7: New "ICO" (legal digital currency issue)

The CoinShares report points out that the number of new "ICOs" (initial country offerings) is rising. From Venezuela's oil coins to SOS in the Marshall Islands, China and Turkey have also proposed the development of government-backed digital currencies. This “race” seems to be going on.

Trend 8: Technology giants look at finance

From Facebook to Apple and Uber, large technology companies are entering the financial industry. This will equate them with an "alternative central bank." Social networks have become the new payment network.

CoinShares concluded that the new era of digital payments will not be dominated by banks because they do not have the global reach or infrastructure of large technology companies.

Trend 9: Derivatives market fires

The cryptocurrency derivatives market is getting hotter and there are more than $3 billion (derivatives) transactions per day on the 13 largest exchanges. Whether this is good for the industry remains to be discussed. After all, the introduction of regulated bitcoin futures has caused its price to plummet twice.

However, this may be a positive sign if gold has grown since the launch of cash-settled futures (the current futures market is 30 times the physical gold market).

The report also pointed out that the crypto derivatives market needs to be “more robust” and needs to develop better industry risk management practices.

Trend 10: Reduced interest in use, but the number of people adopting is rising

If you analyze key data, such as computing power and number of accounts, you can see that the adoption of cryptocurrencies is rising. Although the search volume, blockchain funds and market capitalization are lower than the previous highs, the industry continues to grow.

Today, computing power on the web is stronger than ever, and chain transactions have grown by more than 150% to $2 billion a day.

2019 is about to pass, and as we enter the new year, many things will still happen. As the report author Melelem points out, if the “more central” and “monitored funds” trends make you feel frustrated, think about it from a different angle, and revolutionary tools are proliferating.

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