Yesterday I recapped the last decade in crypto. Today, let’s look ahead to the future and what I think will happen in the 2020s. Of course, no one can predict the future with much accuracy, but one way to predict it more accurately is to invent it!
In short, I think over the next decade we’ll see a blockchain, that is both more scalable and includes privacy features, reach about 1B users by the end of the decade (up from about 50M at the start of the decade). Adoption will happen both in emerging markets, where the financial systems are most broken, and from a crop of new crypto first startups producing products people want. By the end of the decade, most tech startups will have a crypto component, just like most tech startups use the internet and machine learning today. Governments and institutions will move into the cryptocurrency space in a big way as well.
- Scalability
In the 2020s, I believe we’ll see layer two solutions, or new blockchains come out which increase transaction throughput by several orders of magnitude. Just like broadband replacing 56k modems led to many new applications on the internet (YouTube, Uber, etc), I believe scalability is a pre-requisite for the utility phase of crypto to really get going. Once we see blockchains with several orders of magnitude scalability improvements, we will also see new applications start to develop more rapidly (see “the rise of the crypto startup” below).
Privacy
In addition to scalability, I think we’ll also see privacy integrated into one
of the dominant chains in the 2020s. Just like how the internet launched with
HTTP, and only later introduced HTTPS as a default on many websites, I believe
we’ll eventually see a “privacy coin”
