The euphoria over cryptocurrencies and their related tokens will probably come to froth over in 2018 as the poster child of this bubble - the Bitcoin, continues its stratospheric climb despite the calls of naysayers that we should all prepare for a dramatic impending crash. Emerging technologies that capture the imagination of an increasing number of people all over the world, appear to be the 'IT' tech to solve a wide variety of social and business issues. We have seen waves of these phenomena with the emergence of the Internet, email, search engines, mobile apps, social media and IoT.
Ambitious promoters, entrepreneurs and developers position the blockchain as the one-tech-solves-all platform to disrupt various aspects of business and social life. Some of these developments are logical; others can best be described as fringe.
Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), which leads to the introduction of new crypto tokens have raised USD 4 billion in 2017 so far. This boom is arising from venture capital seeking extraordinary returns and prompted by Bitcoin's success in sustaining the store of value. This is expected to continue well into 2018.
Steemit, utopian-io, Smart Media Tokens and soon to be rebranded vice.org will likely prompt further rises in the prices of Steem and Steem Backed Dollars (SBD).
The factors that could impede the rise of cryptocurrencies include proactive intervention by nations and their regulators to mitigate an economic collapse from a massive bubble blowout. The banking and related financial industry will lobby with money and influence to attempt to curtail the serious threat of crypto assets to their legacy business models. Global mass media will attempt to sow the fear of cryptocurrencies by highlighting the collapse of a few crypto tokens - failing as a result of illogical adoption, fraud or hacking attacks.
Cryptocurrencies backed by public blockchains will see greater improvement in transaction completion throughputs. The scalability issues of cryptocurrencies will also be tackled by upcoming innovations. Marketplaces like Amazon are expected to offer the option of payment for purchases with cryptocurrencies.
We need to see greater innovation to rid the crypto world of third party wallet service intermediaries that are unsafe, prone to attacks, collect far too much personal information and also charge increasingly high transaction fees. We have yet to achieve the 'trustless' transactions that the blockchain was designed to deliver.
2018 will be an exciting year for all of us transitioning to the cryptoeconomy where disintermediation, crypto assets and the resulting innovations will lead to the increased well-being of a wider base of global citizens.
Image Source: Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash
