In really short and simple terms — about 600 days between 2018 and 2019 have come and gone as the period for dreams in the world of Cryptocurrency.
I personally was left with no option but to cancel my own planned trip to the moon and bless the soul of the Uber that brought me back home from the airfield as many also found out it was just a dream.
Many will agree that when the hype train of 2017 came to a standstill many investors felt that crypto was over. But I guess they were wrong!
Adoption has now taken a new toll as major Countries that share a stake in “World Power” have concrete plans of hijacking one of the world’s greatest inventions in the Technological Industry-Blockchain.
In a research by Anton Muehlemann, as far back as January 2019, the United State's global market share dropped from 50% in Q2/17 to 7% in Q4/18, invariably, Asia now appears to be spear-heading about 81% of global digital asset trading.
Also, global trading volumes are still twice as high as in 2017, with digital asset volatilities considerably lower in 2018 than in 2017 but remain high compared to classical markets.
Finally, Crypto-to-Crypto trading is rising with Tether USD (USDT) trading now 2.5 times higher than USD.
Adoption Over Trading
On fundamental level if we forget about the trading prices of digital assets for a bit, we should be able to appreciate that 2018 reached several important milestones towards permanent crypto adoption.
Government Participation
The SEC clarified that neither #Ether (ETH) nor #Bitcoin (BTC) are #securities meaning that trading them was not, and would not in time to come be, illegal for US investors. #Google and #Facebook (partially) reversed their bans on crypto-related advertising allowing legitimate blockchain companies to grow with Facebook even floating its supposed blockchain project #Calibra.
Furthermore, crypto custody is constantly improving and, for the first time, deposits at major custodians and/or #Exchanges are fully insured.
Educational campaigns have launched in all corners of the globe to spread the gospel of Decentralization. It has been a nice period for builders! As CZ will say.
In hindsight, it is more than clear that the hype of 2017 was unsustainable. Neither the technological nor the legal infrastructure was ready for the storm and once mass media jumped on-board to get each and everyone on the crypto ship the downfall was inevitable.
Take Backs From All This
As bad as this fall may have been for new investors it was a necessary and important step to gain enough attention from government, industry, media and academia to bring this technological revolution back on track to becoming a story of success.