First it was the early adopters, the pioneers, the coders and the daredevils of cryptography.
Then came the Silicon Valley investors, the exchanges, the crashes and the hacks.
Then came 2017.
This year saw a massive adherence of day traders and an explosion in the number of ICOs. Retail traders could not leave this opportunity behind. It was when Plus500, Investing.com, markets.com, CNN, Bloomberg, MSNBC, The Huffington Post and many, many others, turned their attention to cryptocurrencies and started spreading clickbait titles, that retail investors too turned their eyes to cryptocurrencies. Traders looking for 10x gains in a few weeks jumped to ICOs without reading White Papers or even fully understanding what the Blockchain is.
2018 will be the year of smart money for cryptocurrencies.
Don't get me wrong. Wall street is into cryptocurrencies yes, but 2018 will be the test year for projects. One thing is to have speculators buying into a coin. Another is to have clients. And this is where things will get serious. We can not keep much longer with the perspective of "The future is [insert coin hodling]". We need big companies starting to use blockchain platforms for their BAU operations. Otherwise we will just be buying and selling terribly expensive Megabytes to each others.
Investors these days gamble before investing into cryptocurrencies. It doesn't matter what the white paper says or if the road map is being respected. It is the hype that matters. Why buying coin A now, which goes up or down 5% per day, when all these coins are getting pumped and pumped and up up up?!
And here is where I propose that investors look at cryptocurrencies as stocks.
...
Wait what?
Yes. It's simple.
All these coins are like the .com companies. Most will fail, but the ones that resist will be the real deal. So instead of watching their daily evolution in price, we should see what they propose. These coins are means of exchange in completely different projects. It's like amazon.com and pets.com different. And many cannot see that one is obviously going to be much bigger than the other because of the hype and the pumps and dumps.
2018 will be a test year for projects. This wave of new investors of 2017 was a wave of retail traders and impulsive investors. All they wanted was to win like others were winning. Bet and gamble and win and lose. The next wave of investors will read White Papers and have a much bigger capacity to hodl. The fresh money into cryptocurrencies in 2018 will be much smarter.
It may as well just be the first year of clients, not investors.