My personal view is that widespread adoption will come from the advantages it provides over traditional markets, not out of novelty. For currencies it is still significantly easier and less expensive to access and use fiat currency, even for international transfers. The tangible advantages it provides are in markets which are slower or more expensive – financial markets are the obvious example. The focus on ETFs is ill conceived in that underlying stocks are already highly liquid. The long term answer is to move stocks onto a more efficient transfer mechanism (ie blockchain), let people trade them how they like. Native issuance is the end goal. That said there are considerable complexities associated with this, not just technical but also legal and regulatory. The intermediate step is to have a product backed by traditional equities but with all of the intrinsic advantages of the blockchain – arbitrage will do the rest. There is already a company doing exactly this called CDRX (www.cdrx.io). They are about to release this “bridge product”, and have called it a Crypto Depository Receipt (CDR)
