WHY 2018 WILL BE A GOOD YEAR FOR CRYPTOCURRENCY

emma001 (51)in #cryptocurrency • 8 years ago (edited)

Introduction

2017 was a great year for cryptocurrencies and the blockchain. It experienced massive gains.

Bitcoin rose from $1000 in the beginning of January 2017 to the ATH of $19000 in December 17, 2017, before closing 2017 at $13,889. However, it still recorded massive gains for investors. Other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, Steem were not left behind. They all had huge gains, some even surpassing bitcoin in terms of ROI

Image Credit

2018 started pretty bad for bitcoin and other cryptocurrency due to FUD by government, financial institutions and the media. That caused cryptocurrency prices to tank/plummet heavily triggering a bearish run and causing for example bitcoin to reach a record low of $5900 on February 6, 2018 as mark last seen in November 2017.

However, this past week has seen bitcoin and other cryptocurrency rally up, with bitcoin surging past $11,279 mark since January 2018 (See here).

However, bitcoin is trading below $11,000, at $10,300 at around 12:00 a.m(GMT).

Bitcoin's price has been slowly climbing higher after a massive sell-off in early February, which was triggered by fears over tighter regulation, rumors of price manipulation in the market.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency seems to get better after every attack. Here's why i think 2018 will be better

Why i think 2018 will be better

1. Introduction of Lightning Network:

The Lightning Network is a "second layer" payment protocol that operates on top of a blockchain. It enables instant transactions between participating nodes and has been touted as a solution to the bitcoin scalability problem. Wikipedia

The lightning network will make transaction very fast. Another goodnews, is the lightning network comes with no fee. It is still in the works however by SegWit(Segregated Witness). It will be introduced in the coming weeks or months.

Major exchange Coinbase has revealed plans to support the SegWit technology to boost transaction speeds, while Microsoft has signalled support for Bitcoin’s approach to speeding up transactions through the “Lightning Network,” which could support up to billions of exchanges per second

With the introduction, transactions and the use of more bitcoin will increase massively, also scaling issues will be solved and BTC and other cryptocurrency will hit the roof.

2. Regulations

Many believe regulation by government will be a bad thing for cryptocurrency, it think regulation is needed at some point to legitimize the use of cryptocurrency.

Regulation might hurt the market but for a short time. Also, Let's look at the brighter side, In the long run, regulation will give users and institutional clients the confidence to invest. Thereby raising the market cap.

Let's take the case of Japan, they started regulating bitcoin. The market dropped initially, but it rose eventually. Read more

About 1% of the world's population are currently invested in Crypto. What do you think will happen to the price if about less than 9% join in?

3. Large scale and more legitimate ICOs

With the awareness created by bitcoin and Ethereum in recent times, the crypto market scale will expand causing more users to join in.

Also there will be more usage of Ethereum like last year because of the advent of ICOs (initial coin offerings) Read more, this impact will create for more use for the ethereum network because ICOs usually require plenty of ether. Thereby increasing the demand for ethereum and other cryptocurrency.

I believe ethereum will do pretty well this year, however, other coins could see similar gains, I believe ethereum will be the main focus when it comes to ICO's.

4. More Institutional investors

With the huge gains recorded last year, i believe this year will see more institutional investors coming to play, by investing. This invariably will cause the price of Cryptocurrency to skyrocket.

It is estimated that $10 billion to $12 billion has so far flown into the crypto ecosystem in the past year from other investors, making market cap to go to $500 million. So imagine if institutional investors come in? . BOOM!! Your guess is as good as mine

Image Credit

Closing Remarks

If all these factors play out, the market's potential could rise to up five to ten if not more. The growth in terms of gains might not be as what we saw in 2017, but this seems to look good with the momentum, awareness gathering around bitcoin in the past few days.

2018 I think will be the biggest year in the crypto space and one of the best advice I can give you is to make sure you are investing in the best cryptocurrencies for the long-term. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, NEO, steem/sbd just to mention a few, seems to be one of them.

N.B: I am not your financial Advisor. So Invest wisely

What are your thoughts? Kindly comment in the section below