This is a difficult question to answer specifically, as we could be in the middle of a financial crash at any one of the points of time. However, I’ll give you the next best thing, which is what I think the ‘correct’ market cap would be for the blockchain space in due time.
Just using Ethereum as an example, we can already see some trends about the actual output of these blockchain organizations and how the market rates their native assets. ETH on the Ethereum blockchain, on it’s two year anniversary this year, was worth roughly $30 billion. Even by Silicon Valley standards, that’s a high valuation. Facebook was only worth $1 billion after two years, which is still considered one of the fastest growing organizations in SV history.
Because of this, we can assume that cryptocurrency market caps lead the market cap of the underlying organizations/assets. In the case of Bitcoin, it was valued in the many billions of dollars well before the underlying utility actually proved to be worth that much. The same thing can be said about Ethereum and even Ripple.
So, we may start to speculate that the market cap of the cryptocurrency is some multiple of the underlying utility/value provided by the organization or the asset. For the sake of comparison, let’s say the value is 10X what the underlying organization would normally be worth. While this has been far from proven true (and even a bit silly considering we’re comparing for-profit with not-for profit orgs), we can start to see if this stands up to muster.
Currently, the market capitalization of the blockchain is $141 Billion, most of that value coming from the top 2–3 cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple). Out of hundreds of other blockchains that have attempted to create value, these three or the current gold/silver/bronze medalists. Is we used our 10X multiplier above, that would mean that the value of these “organizations” would worth:
Bitcoin: $14.1 Billion
Ethereum: $3 Billion
Ripple: $700 million
If you heard about a company coming out of Silicon Valley and their organizations were valued at these amounts, would that seem reasonable to you? To me, it does. We have lots of examples of unicorn organizations being worth 10’s of billion after ~10 years, and even organizations only a few years old being worth over $1 billion.
10X may not be the right multiplier (we are in a bubble, after all), but this seems like a reasonable place to start until we learn more about how this market works. So, to answer the question, I think it’s reasonable to see a $10 Trillion cryptocurrency market by 2030.
After 2008, we saw many internet companies like Google and Facebook be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Given a decade of maturity, I can see the underlying ‘organizations’ in the blockchain space being valued at a trillion collectively. Using our 10X multiplier, we might then say that the cryptocurrency market collectively would be worth $10 Trillion.
I’m sure this method can be improved upon (and hope it does), but for the time being, this is the intuition that makes sense to me in this space.
-Copied-