Investment funds will look to invest in cryptocurrencies
As an asset class, cryptocurrencies are tough to ignore. As I write this, Bitcoin is trading at just over $1,000. Hedge funds and venture capital firms will look for more ways to tap into the cryptocurrency market. Doing so will remove some of the social stigma around cryptocurrencies—mainly due to Bitcoin’s history of use on the dark markets—and popularize investment in cryptocurrencies.
Private blockchains will start feeling the burn
Private blockchains (like the Hyperledger project from the Linux Foundation, R3CEV’s Corda, and the Gem Health network) will start to feel real friction. To date, private blockchains have gotten the benefit of the doubt, receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in funding with little to show for it in production. Many of their projects are not terribly innovative, and haven’t been subjected to the same rigorous review as more public projects.
Bitcoin will see SegWit introduction
Despite the enormous technological and political difficulties involved in upgrading Bitcoin, Bitcoin’s core developers have finally introduced Segregated Witness to the network. The benefits of SegWit are clear: a higher transaction throughput without altering the block size, no transaction malleability and faster block validation. SegWit also makes it easier to develop better wallet software and permits off-chain transactions on the Lightning Network, a protocol for scaling and speeding up blockchains.
Image and Source: https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/23/whats-next-for-blockchain-and-cryptocurrency/