The cryptocurrency market fully came to live in 2017 with Bitcoin going mainstream as the alternative form of investment. As a result, the initial coin offerings (ICO) sprung up with startups looking to raise funds. Other than Bitcoin protocols, there were Ethereum protocols. All this have spilled into 2018 with more ICOs and pre-ICOs ongoing.
We can tell you this; we will not delve into capital dividend election in the digital currency world but, we are going to have the following rule the rapidly growing cryptocurrency market:
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Table of Contents
User verification
You can expect a large number of the digital currency exchanges calling for users to verify their KYC/AML regulations fully. This is the case for people wishing to withdraw fiat currencies for exchanges.
But, you should note that not all exchanges require verification just yet. Verification is an important element in the financial services sector as it prevents money laundering and terrorist financing.
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Decentralized apps will gain traction
There are several thousands of different decentralized applications under development. The state of Apps notes that there are more than 910dApps, all built on Ethereum.
In 2018, most of the decentralized apps are expected to go live. The apps will be used for tokenization of assets, insurance, gambling, payments, and lending, among other uses. Also, the oracles will connect the real world data into the Smart Contracts.
Thanks to the increase in the number of highly functional decentralized apps, you can choose where you want to put your money in as an investor as the market is expected to set high bars for the ICO projects. Also, the decentralized apps will enable usage of blockchain technology for making payments.
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Scalability
The experts in the digital currency world note that 2018 will record scalability as the main thing. This is probably because the number of transactions taking place on the blockchain has been massive. This has led to high congestion of the Bitcoin and the Ethereum blockchains. So, you can expect more popular blockchains to come up.
Even though the Ethereum shows its ability to handle more than one million transactions daily, this won’t be good enough when the decentralized apps launch on the regular.
While there exist several protocols aiming to solve the scalability issue, any of the protocols will only scale if it maintains security and decentralization features.
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Higher volatility
Compared to 2017, the digital markets will get more volatile in 2018 despite the fact that the financial markets foresee a situation where the introduction of Bitcoin Futures and other assets may reduce the currency’s volatility. This may not be the case because the cryptocurrency market operates 24/7/365 in all markets worldwide. Beating this is impossible.
Cryptocurrencies don’t work like the ordinary markets, and so, even an introduction of futures isn’t going to dampen the versatility of the market.
Conclusion
You can only expect higher volatility as major players enter the market. There could be an introduction of taxes and other regulations but, the private use of the coin will also increase as Bitcoin gains a stronger ground as the main digital currency.