2017 was a huge year for the whole Cryptocurrency market, seeing the total Crypto market cap rocketing from $17.7B to a staggering $613B. (coinmarketcap.com)
But 2017 was not just a year of profit, we saw some great leaps forward in Cryptocurrency technology and saw record levels of business adoption.
Many newer coins also gained traction throughout the year, from the huge Ethereum bull run in Q1+2 to the ICO boom mid year and finishing off with many new players such as IOTA, NEO and Cardano.
Lets have a look at two of the main players that I followed in 2017 and what 2018 might hold for them.

Bitcoin

(Bitstamp:BTCUSD Daily)

Bitcoin opened the year at $966 and shot upwards throughout the year to a close of $13880 - a huge move even for Bitcoin. Most of the year was spent within a large ascending channel, which itself had broken upwards from the ascending channel Bitcoin spent most of 2016 in.
During the bull run we saw good corrections, often to around the levels of previous peaks, with the notable exception of the most recent break upwards.
Starting at $5555 to a peak of $19666 this run broke the long term resistance of the 2017 channel before dipping 43%. Bitcoin has a history of huge bull runs followed by strong corrections, most famously the late 2013 Bubble and the less well known April 2013 dip.
So what makes this run different? Well, the main differences here would be the length of the bull run and the age of the market. This current market cycle has been in force since early 2015 with its lows of <$200. And a lot has changes in the market structure since 2013: greater regulation on exchanges; wider acceptance of Crypto by institutions and even governments looking into making their own state Cryptocurrencies.
That being said, I would still advise a some caution towards Bitcoin as, in many ways, its fundamentals do not justify its current market cap.

(Bitcoin transactions per day 14 day moving average - bitinfocharts.com)

Since early 2016, average transactions per day for bitcoin has increased by less than 2x while during the same period the price has increased over 30x. This is not due to low demand to use the network, as attested by the 400x increase in fees (bitinfocharts.com). It is instead due to the heavily political issue of Bitcoin scaling. Conflict over how Bitcoin should be scaled has been causing issues since before 2016 and has lead to the protocol lagging behind in technology compared to other top Cryptocurrencies.
I shall give a full post on my view of Bitcoin in the future, but in short, I feel that these issues have caused it to stray away from its original vision as a cheap and fast currency that is open for the world to use.

Ethereum

(GDAX:ETHUSD Daily)

In 2017 Ethereum saw an even greater move than Bitcoin, rising by almost 6000% during the bull run between December 2016 and June 2016 and by a total of nearly 9000% through the whole of 2017.
After the major bull run up to June, Ethereum then saw a huge consolidation period right through to late November which was followed by a smaller consolidation zone above the long term resistance line. This then brings us to the start of the current bull run, which looks set to push us towards $1000 and beyond.
Similarly to Bitcoin, Ethereum has been experiencing some transaction throughput issues. However, these are usually short lived as the dynamic scaling for blocks allows miners to vote for higher throughput over time. Due to this, we are now regularly seeing over 1M transactions per day (bitfinocharts.com), around 3x greater than that of Bitcoin.
We are also seeing concrete scaling proposals being actively developed for the Ethereum blockchain, such as Sharding and Plasma.
Personally, I am more bullish on Ethereum as a long term investment that Bitcoin, as the technology is being rapidly improved and the Ethereum blockchain is being built on top of by vastly more of developers and businesses than any other Cryptocurrency, as shown by the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.

Conclusion

Going into 2018 I am extremely bullish on Cryptocurrency as a whole, I believe that Crypto and blockchain technology will be used to bring greater efficiency to many industries and will be accepted more and more by businesses and institutions as they mature.
I also personally believe that smart contract based Cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum will likely be some of the highest gainers as we see greater adoption, but only once we have solutions to issues such as scaling.
While I am not particularly bullish on the fundamentals of Bitcoin, I do expect that it will probably increase in value along with the rest of the market, if only for to its brand recognition.

I wish you all a happy and successful 2018.

Disclaimer

I will do my best to give unbiased, objective analysis, but I can make no promises about my accuracy.
All posts are based on my personal opinions and ideas and do not constitute professional financial investment advice.