If you follow our announcements and releases closely enough, you may have noticed that our team is actively involved in a great variety of events from the crypto-world. In addition to networking and presenting our products, we study other players, look for new investors, and of course, discuss the latest market news.
The next event we are going to visit is the Consensus — an annual blockchain technology summit carried out by CoinDesk. In May, Consensus will be held for the 4th time. According to the organizers, it will feature 250+ speakers and 4,000+ attendees from the leading industry startups, as well as investors, financial institutions, enterprise tech leaders, and academic and policy groups who are building the foundations of the blockchain and digital currency economy.
Before we embark on this trip, we decided to share some things which will probably be discussed at the summit. Once again, they will help us to answer for what and for whom we’re developing Paytomat. We’ll try not to get into the nitty-gritty details too much, but rather take a helicopter view of the market in general.
In the financial world, it is customary to consider long interval news, so we’ll be focusing on the end of 2017 and early 2018. Let’s start with the general trend.
Numbers show that cryptocurrencies have made some historic moves: at the end of the year total cryptocurrency market cap broke $600bn; after uncertainty around fork ends, bitcoin’s price broke free and toppled multiple milestones; finally, the vast majority of cryptocurrencies reached all-time highs. Meanwhile, BTC dominance shrank to all-time lows and fell below 40%.
Surprisingly, even the CryptoKitties’ game popularity has played an important role in these shifts. Although, it did slow down the Ethereum network, it has also shown promise for future developments and abilities of ETH. Along with this, Google searches for blockchain terms have set all new highs, especially in December. Also, transactions on major blockchains have increased. For example, Ethereum broke all-time transaction records.
Such rapid popularity has affected young projects as well. As a result, ICOs raised over $3bn at the end of the year. We saw the cumulative effect of when funds raised with token sales increased from 737M in Q2 to $3,231mn in Q4. In addition, the CFTC approved CME & Cboe’s launch of Bitcoin futures contracts that also played into the market’s hands. Although, there was some negative news at the end of the year. For example, Bitfinex & Tether became targets of US regulators after suspicious activity results in the subpoena.
What about investors and crypto holders themselves? To understand their mood, let’s have a look the survey conducted by CoinDesk. The company interviewed around 3000 respondents and received some interesting results:
- 92% of all respondents bought cryptocurrency in 2017;
- 86% owned over three unique digital assets, 2% never owned;
- 27% own $10k — $50k worth of cryptocurrency, 16% own $1k — $5k;
- 60% just started following cryptocurrencies in 2017, with less than 2% getting involved in 2010;
- 68% think the industry moved away from its cypherpunk roots;
- and finally, most respondents feel positive about the development of the cryptos in 2018
As you can see, these trends demonstrate confidence in the future and show that the development of the sphere continues. Despite the corrective trend of the main crypto-assets, they hardly change.