2018 in 4 words: ICO and Ethereum are dead



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Unless you're Spencer Bogart, most people would agree that 2018 was a sad year for encryption, even if they do not say it in their Twitter feeds. If you want to summarize the year in four words, you can try to use these: ICO and Ethereum are dead.

Forums, Telegram groups, unexpected chats, there is no shortage of forecasts for the collapse of Ethereum, the future of ICOs, the FUD and the annoying personal fears about ending up in a dumpster. But, beyond gossip and speculation, what do industry insiders have to say?

Here the best executives of OKEx, ShapeShift, SFOX, Decred, eMusic and ICOx Innovations share their views until 2018 and what is in the radar for next year. Some may surprise you.

The price of Bitcoin has been manipulated

Andy Cheung
Andy Cheung, head of OKEx operations

Andy Cheung believes that the institutions are controlling the market and that once the price is around $ 3,000, then it will be time to rebound when the investors of the big armed companies get on board. He says:

Personally I think people are pushing down because we want more traditional and institutional people to enter the market. He was too tall, people were like "what the hell?" Right now it's a very good price, so traditional people can actually enter the encrypted space and then we'll slowly go up. $ 3000 are really cheap to buy right now and I think they will go up.

Ico and Ethereum are dead

Jake Yocom-Piatt Youtube
Jake Yocom-Piatt Co-founder of Decred

Decred Jake co-founder Yocom-Piatt has not stopped talking and has had a few more things to say about 2018 compared to the bitcoin price.

As an autonomous digital currency focused on community input and sustainable development funding, it is perhaps a little biased. Not only did 2018 kill the ICOs, but it claims that Ethereum is also panting for its last breaths.

In 2018, we saw the ICO model die, Ethereum flame out, dApps and token go to zero, and ERC-20 projects generate insanely creative business models just to avoid regulation in a shameless take of money. The observation of these failures has reinforced our belief that the future driven by the blockchain is not a quick solution. It will take decades, patience and longevity to build and get mass adoption.

Institutional Investments and Stablecoin in 2019

Akbar Thobhani
CEO of Akbar Thobhani SFOX

You might be bored of hearing about institutional investments. But even though CME and CBOE did not bring the expected wads from Wall Street initially planned, projects like Bakkt and Fidelity seem to offer something different.

Physically established futures contracts mean at least that speculative traders must buy bitcoins to bet on their price. And with companies like Microsoft and Starbucks supposedly on board, maybe the game will change.

Akbar Thobhani, as CEO of SFOX, a criptoval prime dealer who is building an institutional cryptographic asset management platform, it is clear that putting the great players on board is in his interest. He says:

2018 was characterized by important infrastructural developments and by the institutional buy-in. Despite the recent conditions of the bear market, this trend will continue next year. I believe that when prices recover, we will see at least a $ 50 million or more ICO registered with the SEC or otherwise work with their blessing.

We could even see a player like Fidelity that includes cryptocurrencies as a 401 (k) investment offer. Moreover, while most of the efforts of stablecoin were concentrated in the United States in 2018, in 2019 an increasing number of countries will adopt their stablecoins and, as a consequence, the volume of stablecoin will become collectively higher than the trading volume of a top five crypts.

The blast bubble was a blessing for the disguise

Cameron Chell
Cameron Chell, President of ICOx Innovations

Cameron Chell, President of ICOx Innovations who creates cryptographic products for established companies to grow their business through blockchain, believes that the 2018 bear market was indeed a good thing. Despite falling prices, many family names have begun to take an interest in blockchain technology and will continue to do so.

Respected brands such as IBM, Walmart and Kodak have collaborated with some of the best minds in the blockchain to bring transparency to the supply chain and intellectual property protection, to name a few industries. Meanwhile, institutional heavyweights such as Goldman Sachs and Fidelity have opened special encryption desks – signaling that, apart from speculation, the crypt and blockchain are a long-term game, and all pay attention. The bubble of the encrypted speculation that broke out in 2018 was a blessing in disguise. It made the mania dissolve into the background, which will open the way for real-world blockchain applications to come to the fore in 2019.

The year of the inverse ICOs

Tamir Koch
Tamir Koch

Tamir Koch, president of eMusic, the first music platform to completely embrace the blockchain through the eMusic Blockchain project for music distribution and payments, says that inverse ICOs will dominate the landscape for the coming year. Increasing dry payloads at the start will not be as simple as presenting a white paper and an & # 39; idea.

Despite the market crisis, 2018 was the year when the mainstream adoption of cryptography began to be felt. I believe that 2019 will be a major step forward, with a great player coming out and embracing cryptography, like a payment company that accepts cryptography, pushing the public to adopt the mainstream. 2019 will also be the year of the ICO reverse. Business days are over with just a white paper and a dream.

Bitcoin will never die

Jon
Co-founder of Jon ShapeShift

Finally, the ShapeShift co-founder and the COO Jon silence the critics and all the opponents who ring the death knell for bitcoins. Instead of selling hopium to the masses, he recognizes that last year was not a good result, but that there is still a lot of struggle in Bitcoin.

I will not soften the current crisis in the encrypted market. We have seen investors become more reserved and currencies, though no longer in freefall, struggling to regain relative value. However, the claim that Bitcoin is dead is ridiculous. We have heard this proclaimed in the past, and we will undoubtedly hear it again and again in the future. We know it's not true, and 2018 was a year of rapid growth and technological innovation for companies across the industry. Yes, the bear market matters, but it is a period of time with a beginning and an end, part of a cycle that is repeated over the years.

At ShapeShift, we are focusing on what comes next. For 2019, I am particularly excited at the idea that the Lightning, Ethereum and other protocols continue to work on downsizing. They are exciting to watch and are making important developments.

The Takeaway

So that's it. Unlike last year when analysts were struggling to make bold predictions about when the crypt was about to go to the moon, some experts are saying that the ICO and Ethereum are dead. There is also a lot more attention to the protocol than the price.

Yet all opinions seem to lead in much the same way: the blockchain revolution will take more time than we thought, but we are still moving in the right direction (unless you are HODLing Ethereum).

To use Yocom-Piatt's closing words:

Just like during the dot-com bubble, resistance counts. Those who survived the dot-com clash were high on those who ran out of gas. Those projects dominate the space.

Shutterstock foreground image. Portraits from LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube.

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