2019: A Blockchain Year in Review

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CENNZnet

5 min readDec 4, 2019

2018 was pivotal for blockchain technology so I wrote an article earlier this year, where I made seven predictions for 2019. Time to see what this year brought for us.

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1. Regulation moves blockchain from the fringes to the mainstream

With countries like Malta, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Japan, and Estonia that were very blockchain-friendly right from the get-go, other European countries such as France, Sweden and Italy quickly followed suit in 2018 or early 2019 Europe is a progressive region for cryptocurrencies and Distributed Ledger Technology right now. The trend continued with pretty much all major economies worldwide either passing new regulations, changing their existing regulatory infrastructure to accommodate for the new technological landscape, or actively working to do so.

Specifically, I would like to point out regulatory efforts from the European Commission, the UK, Japan, Australia, India, and South Korea. It should be noted that not all regulation is positive for every type of blockchain project, but it will bring more clarity and legal certainty for the industry as a whole. It will help weed out scams and provide legal footing to make investment and development decisions on. Furthermore, not all countries seem to agree on what they consider “good” regulation. For example, the SEC and their UK-based equivalent FCA take somewhat opposing stances. While the SEC keeps its stance, defining most tokens as securities, the FCA has declared that “any token that is not a security token, or an e-money token is unregulated”.

2. Blockchain solutions evolve from experimental projects to tangible products

The Decentralised Finance movement, particularly on Ethereum, seems to be growing at a good pace, particularly around the MakerDAO ecosystem. The instantly compounded interest rate that can be earned by staking stablecoins is far above the interest rate of traditional call money bank accounts, which can potentially attract many investors who were previously deterred by the volatility of cryptocurrencies. Every month, there are newly emerging products or DAOs, whether it’s margin trading, lending, or other financial services.

As DApps leave the realm of experimental projects and set foot into the business world, they will often require a solution that is more technologically advanced than Ethereum. Accordingly, we can see several highly scalable smart contract platforms finally striving for maturity, including Centrality of course. A good example of this is Sylo, which has gone from an experiment to the fastest growing DApp right now.

3. Gaming drives consumer blockchain adoption

Although I have not seen any developments that I would classify as mainstream adoption, there are some very positive signals. Besides raising 33,333 ETH from their pre-sale, Immutable raised over $15 million in venture capital for their Trading Card Game Gods Unchained. Not to mention that they auctioned one card for over 146 ETH, meaning that the second most valuable trading card ever sold is a non-fungible token.

After joining forces with PokéFind in 2018 to bring their NFT-gaming multiverse to one of the most popular Minecraft servers worldwide, Enjin has released an SDK, which allows JAVA developers to seamlessly communicate with the Ethereum blockchain. Their first test case is a Minecraft server that goes by the name EnjinCraft.

All in all, I think that the full potential of blockchain-based gaming has not been realized yet, but we are getting there.

4. Proof of Stake delivers network scalability

The transition towards Proof of Stake is going forward a bit slower than I anticipated. So far, no major network has switched mainnet from PoW to PoS, but there are a few novel PoS smart contract platforms that are currently being rolled out. With Cosmos having launched their mainnet this year and Polkadot getting close to launching, PoS adoption is making slow, but steady progress. Also, more and more of Cardano’s token holders have enough trust in the platform to stake their tokens.

At Centrality, we launched our PoS based network CENNZNET which is currently in federated staking mode and will upgrade to community staking next year. In the meanwhile, we have established a reward programme where users can already stake their CENNZ and receive a share of the first batch of CentraPay tokens.

The need for PoS is greater than ever, as the last two years were rife with 51 % attacks on smaller Proof of Work blockchains, which were enabled by cheap access to cloud mining services. Some of these attacks were even livestreamed on Twitch.

5. Focus moves from tech to user experience

There’s a general trend that the industry has started talking a lot about adoption. It is at the forefront of conversation now, but mainstream adoption of blockchain technology cannot happen unless we provide the necessary quality of user experience.

Decentralized applications still face the problems that users notice that there is a blockchain running in the background and passing their actions onto the blockchain requires time and tedious wallet transactions. One of the major issues is, therefore, to develop lightweight wallets with good usability.

6. A top 10 social network implements blockchain

Two of the hottest topics this year were Facebook’s Libra stablecoin and the Telegram Open Network. Although, or specifically because they have the potential to bring blockchain technology to mainstream adoption, both projects faced heavy resistance from regulators.

One of the main reasons cited for cracking down on Libra is that such a global payment system, backed by a basket of fiat currencies and other assets, would threaten the sovereignty of national currencies. There were concerns about privacy (naturally) and about enforcing AML rules, ironically the Libra system would be much more effective at controlling money laundering than existing interbank and cash-based systems. At some point, this urban legend criticism of Digital Assets will die.

I don’t want to get into detail about the various flaws of Libra, mostly being heavily centralized and having been initiated by, well, Facebook. The problem with calling for regulators to strike down projects like Libra is the danger that they will do the same for projects we love. Telegram got a taste of that, as the SEC blocked the release of the TON mainnet through a lawsuit, not even three weeks before the deadline laid down in TON’s SAFT agreements ran out. Despite this, TON has released a testnet wallet on GitHub.

As for the good news, Japan’s leading messenger app LINE has successfully launched a blockchain mainnet, which will aid in processing transactions between their users.

7. At least one sovereign nation launches a digital currency

With the E-Dinar, Tunisia has launched the world’s first digital currency that is backed by a central bank. Also, the People’s Bank of China will join the race early next year. According to President Xi Jinping, China is committed to seizing the opportunities blockchain technology creates. Whether this means that China will adopt a more positive stance on cryptocurrencies or merely launched a national digital currency as an alternative remains to be seen though.

So after a full-on year that's a pretty good strike rate, stay tuned to find out what my picks are for next year.