1/ My view on the last 10 years of crypto and it's macro level trends: Not a single protocol or smart contract platform really generated any profit yet OR cut significant cost for a company, and this is totally fine. Bitcoin and Ethereum took +5 years to mature and really get
2/ battle-tested, and still are mostly used on a small scale by speculators and a few shop owners as payment option. The real use case, which is higher automation via immutable smart contracts, has yet to reach adoption. It couldn't have really started YET. Ethereum wasn't mature
3/ There were not many secure/proven smart contract libraries available. We have still seen exploits of more mature startups/projects contracts. Also, Ethereum on it's own, no matter how many and how qualified the developer are, can not really solve any real world use cases
4/ without having a realible backbone protocol for data inputs aka decentralized oracles for example. Chainlink just went live in 2019, 5 years after Ethereum. It was neither too late nor was it to early. It's the right time to go live and ramp up real world adoption.
5/ Big companies from the IT sector, banking/fintech, insurance and leading cloud providers, have been joining the DLT space in 2016/17 already and silently testing demos and prototypes, mostly on private chains that are Ethereum compatible. Many of them reported successfull
6/ testing phases and are about to start going live with a real world implementation. Gartner and Capgemini wrote in their smart contract report, that they expect real world adoption to START in 2020-2023 and I do fully agree with that. Ethereum is going from prototype phase
7/ into the realworld-enterprise phase with the help of tenthousands of developers, with the help of hundreds of infrastructure products that matured over the last few years, and with the help of end to end secure oracles for delivering outside data in a highly secure manner
8/ What I think is happening in the next 1-3 years, is the DeFi space getting a ton of traction, together with the upcoming bullmarket. We are gonna see an aggressive rise in locked up tokens in the major protocols being used: ETH, LINK and SNX probably as leaders.
9/ A new cycle of retail money is slowly starting to buy in and a wave of new tech and ICOs or STOs will once again, fuel another speculation phase. I can only imagine what kind of total marketcap the space can actually reach, when companies start to actually cut costs and profit
10/ from this new tech. We almost reached 1 trillion dollar marketcap (even if artificially inflated), with no actual profits/cost cutting yet. The next 5-10 years will be an arms race of tech companies to adopt and profit from this proven tech, that is now mature enough to start
11/ using in production. Furthermore, custody solutions are propping up here and there, and with that, family offices and more hedge funds can join the party with piece of mind when it comes to securing/insuring the funds they put into the DLT space. Following interviews
12/ with high net worth individuals, the top 1% does not even have 0.1% of their portfolio in DLT assets. The space moves from being only attractive to high risk profile individual investors and high risk hedge funds + retail money, to mid risk investors, normal hedge funds,
13/ index funds and an even bigger wave of retail money. German banks are starting to offer buying and storing of cryptos. My main position is and will stay in the most relevant protocol, which in my opinion is #Chainlink. Over 90% of my portfolio consists of LINK.
14/ If I had 10,000,00$ and would have to invest for +5 years, I would put 80% into LINK and 20% into ETH. Let's see where this would bring me. I wish you guys a happy new year and best of luck investing into the space! Cheers
Also: I think in this upcoming bullmarket, the general sentiment about what cryptos actually are for is changing strongly. My view is, that cryptocurrencies are not money for the people, but have and will also be money for smart contracts. Being usable by people is a side-product
