Bitcoin striving, but blockchain thriving
9 charts that tell the real story
1: The rise and fall of bitcoin
Bitcoin has been spoken about a lot in the 10 years since its birth. Unleashed on the world in 2008, a few weeks after the financial crisis was ushered in as indicated by the fall of Lehman Brothers, it largely stayed in corners of the Internet till a mini bubble grew and popped in 2013–2014. Since then a lot of excitement has built around cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin and other coins flourished, especially in 2017, only to meet their comeuppance in 2018.
2: People looking for information on bitcoin
Our curiosity about the technology has followed the price chart above(more or less). So if Google searches in Dec 2018 were at a 100, we were down 90% by Nov 2019.
3: No of transactions on the bitcoin blockchain
Looking past prices, the number of transactions has been going up steadily
4: Number of wallets and user accounts
Coinbase and Blockchain are both reporting that they added more than 50k wallets per day recently. Last year Coinbase had more accounts than Charles Schwab did — and there are no signs that this has not been reinforced this year.
5: Blockchain in the enterprise
For all the focus on cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Blockchain is solving real problems in the enterprise, in governments, and among technology visionaries.
6: Enterprise Blockchain is a $20B+ opportunity
7: A lot of capital invested in Blockchain
VCs are patient capital building for the long term. The wall of innovation funded by over $3B of early stage investor interest has not hit us yet.
8: And this is smart money
Experienced VC firms that know how to build large viable businesses have continued to fund the Blockchain led and Blockchain based innovation.
9: A portfolio beyond “Crypto”
As a blockchain focused VC firm, we recommend a broad diversified long term approach to playing the opportunity. These are a select few of the 25 positions in our portfolio at Applied Crypto Ventures.
My long form posts on Blockchain investing:
- A Framework for Blockchain Investing
- Guardrails for blockchain investors
- My latest adventure: a Blockchain VC Fund for qualified individual investors
- Yet another primer on Blockchain
Other analyses from me on Medium:
The author is the Managing Partner at Applied Crypto Ventures. His views are almost always personal and you can follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter.
