Forget about DLT – 2018 will be the year of the crypto asset – but institutions and banks are simply not ready. How should you sell bitcoin? Are you ready?
In the last several months I’ve heard one thing from conversations across the industry, forget about DLT, it’s all about crypto now.
Why was 2017 the year of the Cryptoasset?
Simply put, the never ending price rises from nearly $1,000 in January to over $19,000 at its peak in early December. At the consumer level, services like coinbase.com were opening as many as 500,000 “wallets” per day and struggling to cope with demand. This gold rush like clamour for access to Bitcoin whilst driven by speculation forced people to engage with the topic.
Away from consumers, institutions such as hedge funds, wealth funds and pension funds followed the family offices in looking for large scale access to the cryptoasset markets. In 2017 we saw much more than exchanges that allow consumers to buy Bitcoin, we now have grown up financial market stuff like…
- OTC desks, where market makers such as Gemini, DRW and Circle allow you to buy significant quantities of Bitcoin across multiple exchanges
- Futures contracts (from both CBOE and CME) as a regulated financial product
- Custodians such as Xapo, Vo1t and Coinbase allowing large funds to “Store and protect” their Bitcoin at scale and in a way complaint with their regulations
Why was 2017 the year of Bitcoin? Because the institutions moved in, and they’re just getting started.
Source: 2018 Blockchain Predictions – Are YOU Ready? – 11:FS
