This has been a rough year for blockchain and the crypto world. We’ve been witnessing the rise and fall of major cryptocurrencies’ prices, changes on the market, hectic formalisation of the sector and wide distributed ledger adoption. Let’s sum it up.
Bitcoin and Ethereum rise and fall
After December 2017, where Bitcoin reached almost $20K, the prices started to falling, bursting the crypto bubble. Now, at the end of 2018, it’s trading below $4K, with no prospects of change the bearish tendency.
The situation with altcoins was similar – warping the year into a tough one for traders.
The fall in market capitalisation was from a number of issues, including casual traders pulling out their investments and ICO fundraising cashing out.
The popularity of ICO fundraising
ICO became a popular way to raise funds for business projects. It’s easy, low cost and simple. But when you gather all the crypto assets during the token offering, you still need to exchange it for the regular fiat money – and that means a token sell off.
If you sell the assets, the prices go down, contributing to the overall price decrease in the market.
Legal changes in 2018 in crypto
The popularity of this form of fundraising enforced the introduction of new regulations, especially in the US. This year has been challenging when it comes to adjusting new projects to the law. If you were preparing your own offering, you had to be agile and keep finger on the pulse.
At this point, the situation is much clearer and it’s easier to stay compliant. Compliant security tokens are not easy to mint, but at least we know where we stand, and we know what’s waiting for us around the corner.
Adoption
2018 was a big leap for the wide adoption of blockchain. While cryptocurrency payments didn’t grow as much as expected, the distributed ledger increased popularity in private and public sectors.
In our recent post on blockchain in public sector, we referenced a number of new appliances, such as Polish credit reference agency, banks and court in the UAE. “Blockchain” transforms from a buzzword into a useful technology, providing a set of features to solve business problems.
New projects and blockchain technology development
This year we’ve seen a number of interesting projects’ launch, but the show stealing event was EOS release – a serious Ethereum competitor, that raised $700,000,000 during their ICO.
There was a lot of progress in the other projects as well. Just to mention a few: Aeternity, IOTA and Golem have a very promising future.
A short 2018 Blockchain summary:
2018 was a busy year for the distributed ledger technology. It was a huge leap into the next stage of a grown up, well tested, regulated and widely adopted technology. Companies are applying blockchain to solve business problems. Blockchain became much more practical.
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