Today’s topic #1: Blockchain market trends for 2018.

**I just recently realised that I hate speaking about TRENDS. **

Everything in crypto space moves so fast that two days before the conference you prepare a slide that crypto market is positive and on the presentation day you see blood on CoinMarketCap.

However, as I had to give a presentation about the Blockchain and Crypto Currency Trends for 2018 in Barclays Rise Vilnius Center, I decided to share my insights with you about the way I see where the crypto market is heading! (Please note that all these predictions can fail completely.)

So let’s start.

ICOs are here to stay

As there is an incredible amount of ICO’s happening at the moment and more planned, in 2018 we should see this number growing exponentially.

Therefore, the amounts raised should proportionally decrease, as more and more projects will be fighting for the slowly increasing amount of investments.

Based on recent news, we will probably see more and more Corporate Token Sales happening. That is pretty interesting market move, and it will be great to see how it will affect the whole ICO market. Now, we even know some local enterprises with over 500+ employees preparing to do an ICO for part of their business. One of the global examples is Kodak — building a blockchain for photographers.

Another great example is Telegram. Telegram is a messaging app, like Facebook Messenger, just more secure and private. Recently, Telegram announced ICO to build a native messaging cryptocurrency which raised huge crypto community attention. Currently, Telegram is a number one app for all ICO’s to build community at, therefore, I see huge opportunities even performing ICO directly in Telegram chat. (sounds crazy, but maybe this is what we will see in the near future?) There are some rumours that they already have intentions for investing over 2.5 BILLION USD.

In 2018 we should see results of the project that did their ICO last year. Most of the roadmaps declared major development progress in 2018. Therefore, it will be fascinating to see how the market moves once those projects will deliver or underliver.

Cryptocurrency might face a huge shift

I am not a fan of two things: day trading and Bitcoin. As most of the media attention was caught by Bitcoin, due to its growth in 2017, most of the people entered the crypto market due to this reason (thanks, Bitcoin!). However, all those people will soon realise, that Bitcoin does not have the clear and promising roadmap, all those forks, slow confirmation speed and crazy transaction costs (30$ fee to buy a coffee for 2$ is crazy) will make them look for alternatives.

Therefore, I believe in 2018, more and more newcomers Bitcoin holders will realise, that there are much more promising cryptocurrencies and as Bitcoin starts losing its attention, fresh “crypto investors, portfolio managers and analysts” will switch to other currencies. (NOTE: I may be completely wrong, but this is what I feel from the capital movement during last month and discussions happening on Reddit.)

And as I love Ethereum (because I help various ICO’s to launch their projects on it), I believe that the graph below strongly supports my statements above.

January 14th

Decentralised exchanges

In 2018 we should see more and more user-friendly and effective decentralised exchanges. Such exchange is basically a smart contract deployed to Ethereum Network and enabling users to exchange ETH and any other ERC-20 tokens directly without an intermediary. Owners of such exchanges are just maintaining user-friendly interfaces and improving Smart Contracts.

A great example is Bancor decentralised exchange. See how simple with a few clicks you can exchange your ETH into any ERC-20 token with a great UX. The main drawback is Ethereum GAS cost to perform such transaction, however, in the near future with the introduction of Proof of Stake we should see the decreasing price of gas.

Blockchain

2017 was the year of Ethereum and all the ICOs happened there. However, I believe that in 2018 we should see at least part of ICO’s happening on other platforms such as EOS (I had an opportunity to try the developer’s version myself and create my own currency with C++, which was pretty easy). Or NEO is another potential option. I believe, that it won’t happen soon and Ethereum will stay dominant in 2018 as the ICO platform, however, there will be more and more alternatives with more flexible development language selection, as well as faster speed.

Consensus algorithms

As mining farms used to mine Bitcoin are being deployed all over the world and polluting our environment incredibly (read more here), in my deep belief, we should build new Blockchains with some more eco-friendly consensus algorithms, such as Proof of Stake. Besides, Ethereum should do a switch from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake in 2018. Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Dash probably won’t do that switch (due to its strong miner’s community who obviously would not like to lose their profits). But what I see is that new platforms are trying to get rid of Proof Of Work mining.

Smart Contracts Security

As Smart Contracts usually handle millions USD worth of Ethers, the price of a bug in the code is incredibly high. We have seen from our experience at Cryptodus that there are so many flaws that can be left and even a Senior developer in some other technology can leave critical bugs as he does not understand Solidity specifics and Blockchain Transactions in general. Therefore, the importance of auditing will grow and some standards or auditing procedures should be defined once the regulators come to fully regulate ICO market. Maybe we will see some ISO standards for whole ICO process including Smart Contracts auditing and deployment procedures?

Blockchain tech skills

ICO projects raised millions in 2017 are looking for a various type of Blockchain developers (e.g. Monetha, Mysterium, Aigang). If you have the needed skills, you can work in any part of the world, get a decent salary and stay motivated with Tokens. In my opinion, we will see even more shortage of Blockchain developers in 2018. If you are a skilled developer in some other Technology, I would suggest you to start learning about Blockchain and jump to the train!

Key opportunities in 2018

If you are thinking, what are the opportunities and how you could create value in the market? I would like to share few opportunities I see will be extremely hot in 2018.

**Raised cryptocurrency via ICO exchange to fiat currency and transfer to the bank. **

This process is still complicated due to various keywords such as KYC, AML etc., so if you can facilitate this process, you should be able to take a decent fee from the whole amount!

Security

Usually, ICO is performed by few entrepreneurs. And those guys now control millions USD worth of Ethers. You could ask me, what can go wrong? ANYTHING! There were so many scams, failures, lost private keys in the space that statistics is scary: in total 400 Million USD of 3.7 Billion USD raised in ICOs were stolen. Therefore, service providers that help and guide project teams with such keywords as 2FA, 24-word seed, Private key, Hashing, anti-DDoS etc., should see a bright future!

Knowledge transfer

We should notice a big knowledge transfer from Crypto experts and fans to Crypto newcomers holding bitcoin. Naturally, they will need to understand the importance of hardware wallet, private-public key cryptography, hashing etc. to participate properly in the market. Hence, if you have that knowledge, monetize it and help as more people as you can to enter the crypto market!

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