From the first to the last day of 2017, the total value of the crypto market had increased 33 times. Especially in the last two months of 2017, there was a spree of attacks on coins. This allowed a large group of people, myself included, to become familiar with crypto. I have been interested in crypto throughout 2018 and am convinced that this industry will mark the next 20 years.
The higher the potential of an industry, the earlier the future cash flows are priced in by investors. Many crypto projects that poured millions of dollars in 2017 and 2018 were just white papers. Expectations were extremely high, and it soon became clear that adaptation would take longer than originally thought. However, it would not be necessary to wait very long. At the end of 2021, there were 30 times more crypto users in the world compared to the first days of 2017. (10 million --> 300 million)
The chart below, which interprets crypto adoption by comparing it to internet adoption, shows that the number of crypto users could reach 1 billion by 2025.
The exponential increase in internet users in the 90s led to the emergence of the dot.com bubble. Prices soared during the dot.com bubble, and it took 15 years for the Nasdaq index to regain its 2000 peak. On the crypto side, a unique data pattern has emerged. The peaks reached in the price bubbles formed in 2013 and 2017 were exceeded after three years. We do not yet know how many years later the summit that occurred in 2021 will be recaptured.
According to the famous hype cycle put forward by Gartner, technologies go through a five-stage maturation process.
Source: Wikipedia Commons
Inevitably, the question of what stage the crypto industry is at now comes to mind. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to ask at what stage the different applications of the crypto industry, such as decentralized web, zero-knowledge proofs, NFTs, stablecoins, dapps, and cryptocurrencies, are at. You can access the graph created by Gartner on this subject via this link.
Conclusion
Considering crypto adoption in a single waveform, we can see the end of 2017 as the "peak of inflated expectations." I'm assuming we are now in the "slope of enlightenment" stage.
The crypto industry offers us more real use cases today than in 2018. In addition to blogging on Hive today, we can now also share videos. We can buy and sell various NFTs and tokens, play games, and even gamble. Today, the number of Hive users is close to the number of users of Steemit in 2018, but the way users benefit from the network has changed considerably. Financial incentives no longer affect the number of users as much as they did in that period.
Research firm Gartner predicts that concepts of the crypto industry such as decentralized web, zero-knowledge proofs, NFTs, stablecoins, dapps, tokenization, and blockchain interoperability will become mainstream technologies within ten years at the latest. Just as the internet has revolutionized economies, there is no doubt that blockchains will have a similar effect. We will see precisely how many years it will take for the large masses to adapt to crypto and what impact this will have on prices.
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