Let’s imagine on the basis of some trends, both for analytical and entertaining purposes, what the crypto economy might look like around 2030. Will it be as we expect, or perhaps everything will be contrary to predictions.
What will be the future of crypto space
The early crypto economy is the house that Bitcoin built, and the space has been growing rapidly for 10 years. As the crypto space enters its second decade, Ethereum is taking up the baton, and is ready to enter a new era of unprecedented activity in the field of cryptocurrencies.
However, the million-dollar question is now this: how exactly will all the upcoming crypto fuss unfold?
Of course, it is quite difficult to predict what will happen tomorrow in the crypto industry, let alone what will happen years later. But there are already certain macroeconomic trends that can give us an idea of what awaits the cryptocurrency in the future.
The future of cryptocurrencies will be integrated with the Internet of things
The Internet of things is already here. When both of these giants come together, we can no doubt expect a fantastic future for technology. According to a recent IDC report, Blockchain technology is expected to fully join the Internet of things soon.
The main motto of integration is to create a highly scalable and secure platform for communication between IoT devices. Another caveat: cryptocurrencies have the stability to effectively make micro-investments in smart devices.
Optimized Ethereum on the world stage
In our hypothetical future, Ethereum 2.0 has been around for many years and offers users around the world the full promise of the original vision of Ethereum: an excellent platform for open applications and payments.
The early Ethereum community, development, and DeFi ensure that the project is still a secure and leading smart contract platform for the crypto economy, although other projects still exist and are popular in different regions for different reasons. Interoperability reigns, although many chains are actually side chains, and Ethereum serves as the Central node of activity.
At the moment, the pillars of Ether scaling, such as segmentation and second-level side chains, allow the platform to easily provide more bandwidth than major giants such as Mastercard and Visa. Moreover, this scaling technology will also make transactions in ETH cheaper and faster than all traditional alternatives.
DEX become mainstream
Decentralized trading projects such as Uniswap have achieved huge success in 2020, and it’s no wonder why: users like to be able to access new assets without permission and around the clock. And all this without having to register an account.
The popularity of these trading protocols continues to grow today, precisely because of their open and free nature.
This is why one of the most obvious predictions for 2030 is that by then Dex will be much more entrenched in society, and their crypto-centric complexities will be abstracted. These solutions will transform from bright proposals, in a growing niche ecosystem, to a new paradigm of global Finance. This is already happening now.
The outcome of ERC20 BTC is significant
The tokenization of Bitcoin in the form of Ethereum-based ERC20 tokens has gained explosive popularity this year, in no small part due to the growing prospects for productive use of these tokens in DeFi.
However, at the moment, 68,500 BTC have been tokenized on Ethereum, which is 0.326% of the total number of 21 million coins. By 2030, we can predict a major jump, so that more than 33% of this offer will live on the Air, that is +6.9 million BTC.
In this sense, it may end up that none other than Ethereum will become the de facto solution for Bitcoin scaling. This feature may displease some bitcoiners here and now, but over time, more and more users will understand and accept it, as it will work.
Stablecoins are a hit
In the next ten years, we can expect that powerful cryptocurrencies will be a tool for governments and manage cash flows in the country.
The current market capitalization of all stablecoins together is over $17.5 billion. By 2030, the market capitalization will definitely exceed $ 1 trillion.
Why? Stablecoins can be saved and used using their own earning opportunities, such as providing liquidity or lending in ways that are not available for conventional Fiat money.
In addition, stable coins will continue to stimulate and complement the Central Bank’s digital currency (CBDC) efforts. Over time, the boundaries between Fiat currency-linked tokens and CBDC will continue to blur, with the exception of truly decentralized currencies such as MakerDAO’s Dai stablecoin.
As for blockchain, crypto enthusiasts predicted that government agencies would soon start implementing these decentralized systems for their processes. And that time has already come. For example, the Estonian government has already adopted a Blockchain technology called X-Road, which stores the full credentials of all citizens. And so do many countries.
NFTs are becoming a multibillion-dollar market
Non-fungible tokens, or NFT, are a popular use case for Ethereum, which can be used to provide unprecedented provenance for digital assets such as art, collectibles, game items, tickets, and more.
Moreover, since these assets are digital tokens on Ethereum, they can be programmed and expanded in almost limitless ways.
In 2020, total sales of the NFT economy reached the first $ 100 million. However, as these assets continue to pave the way for new types of creative economy, sales will only grow. The NFT market is expected to generate billions of dollars in sales by 2030, respectively.
DAOS are becoming an important force
Decentralized Autonomous organizations, or DAOS, were reborn in the Ethereum community in 2019, and then began to truly flourish in 2020.
These digital, democratic, and transnational cooperatives offer a new paradigm for organizing online communities, and we will see many more of them in the coming years-small, medium, and large.
And everything will be affected, as there will be venture DAOS, eSports, lobbying, social DAOS, and so on. Basically, if you can imagine any group right now, by 2030 someone will most likely get a DAO-ed or something similar.
Social money is no longer an experiment
Social money or personal tokens is one of the new sectors that has risen to the top of Ethereum. They can be revenue sharing agreements (ISAS), community currencies, the memetic value of brands or authors ‘ content, all of the above, or something completely different.
We’ve already seen dozens of personal tokens start to leave via social money platforms like Roll. For example, the $ ALEX token of entrepreneur Alex Masmejan. Expect this trend to continue to the point where investing in “people” within a regular portfolio will become normal and common by around 2030.
DeFi is now simple… finance
Ethereum users call the decentralized Finance arena “DeFi” because it is new and works completely differently from traditional Finance. But this difference will decrease over time.
You may ask why? Since the opportunities for cryptocurrency earnings in DeFi will grow and attract so many users that in the future, many activities of decentralized Finance will become fundamental and typical elements of personal Finance.
By 2030, many users, from consumers to large organizations, will manage non-trivial parts of their financial resources through DeFi platforms. And by that point, all the UX issues that plagued these young platforms will have long since disappeared.
Crypto privacy has been significantly improved
One of the biggest early problems with popular public blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum was the lack of satisfactory privacy solutions.
However, this problem will certainly remain a thing of the past in 2030. At that point, zero-knowledge proof-of-concept (ZKP) mixing tools and projects will be widely used in Ethereum and beyond. This means that privacy will be the default in the space, not subscriptions (as it is now in General).
Indeed, cryptocurrency users in the future will look back at users today, and will be overwhelmed by the level of privacy they enjoy compared to us.
Conclusion
The leading projects of the modern crypto economy hide incredible prospects. Although the time has not yet come for their implementation, everything they have achieved so far gives many reasons for optimism about what they will achieve and how they will help billions of users in the future.
Of course, there will be UPS and downs along the way, just like the ones that the crypto industry has already experienced, the so-called market cycles. But all the recent advances in scaling and DeFi give the impression that a tipping point has been reached, and that mass adoption will be almost inevitable. There is every reason to assume that this goal will be easily achieved over the next decade.
It may look like a utopia, but I’d like to believe it’s going to be like this.
