Leading Trends in the Cryptocurrency Market in 2018
The global digital economy continues its victorious procession. As of the beginning of 2017, about 20% of all goods produced throughout the world are sold through Internet marketing due to several key factors, including the obvious benefits of the virtual trading platform as compared to a standard store, as well as the active development of digital currencies that operate on the basis of the blockchain technology.
Despite the relatively cool attitude of peer payment systems, demonstrated by financial regulators and state institutions of leading world powers, digital money has already proved itself as one of the most actively developing segments of the financial market.
Forecasting is often a thankless task. Nevertheless, we will try to analyze the key trends in the Cryptocurrency market in 2018.
Entering Institutional Investors
Despite the steady growth in the capitalization of digital money and directly related startups, cryptocurrencies remain a rather speculative investment class. Any investments in Bitcoin, or any altcoins, involve serious risks based on their extreme instability, possibility of capital losses, and hypersensitivity from secondary activities.
Still, by the end of 2017, several large commercial financial banks were interested in using digital money as a full-fledged payment instrument, and it is expected that in 2018 such experiments will take place.
The possibility of official trading in digital money is also being looked at by major financial platforms, including the New York Stock Exchange. However, such giants are awaiting the next leaps of Bitcoin and the like. After seeing the achievement of minimum benchmarks, they will try to buy up the maximum possible share of the cryptocurrency market.
In addition, it should be noted that already today, many large private shareholders — mainly from South-East Asia — are actively investing their capital in ICO and start-ups directly related to the technology of blockchain, despite quite strict restrictions on the part of governmental regulations.
n only a year, the total capitalization of the virtual money market grew 30 times and reached $801.7 billion in February 2018. Will it be able to sustain this growth over the next year — for example, Forex with its indicators of $5 trillion US dollars-only time will tell.
Altcoins Are Coming
Despite the general hysteria surrounding Bitcoin as the most popular and expensive cryptocurrency in the world, the second half of 2017 saw leading investors of this market paying close attention to alt coins and their immediate prospects.
The result was that leaders in growth percentage weresuch digital currencies as Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin, and Dash, rather than Bitcoin. Their market profit is simply enormous-9383%, 36564%, 5260% and 9282% respectively-and continues to grow.
Such growth is caused not only by the current media wave, the prospects of blockchain technology and general interest in the digital currency market. Among the factors that influence and, most importantly, will influence the development of this market in 2018, we note the instability of the U.S. dollar, as well as the recognition of the digital finance as official in certain countries of Asia.
The High Prospects of Startup Blockages
The second half of 2017 and beginning of 2018 saw the appearance of several dozens of promising startups aimed not only at simplifying the use of digital money or commercial use of blockchain technology, but also the development of advanced multimedia and digital technologies in the field of social communications and the entertainment industry. In addition to the already well-established Cypherium, Experty, ConnectJob, and Odem showed the competitive development of domestic startups.
For example, there is the original offspring of the company VR Technologies (VRT), which created the original technology Full-Body Tracking Virtual Reality. The technology allows you to transfer the movement of the human body in virtual reality with high accuracy up to a millimeter. This technology is already used in the interactive game “Star Troopers” (a development of VRT).
Full-Body Tracking VR is primarily available to the participants of the blockchain-platform, which will be launched by VR Technologies as early as 2018. It is assumed that in the near future, the blockchain-based ecosystem will unite VR developers from around the world, providing them with an SDK and API for creating their own products. Each of the developers will have the opportunity to test and monetize games on offline sites-VR-parks, part of a franchise network inactive development by VR Technologies. In turn, the blockchain-based ecosystem will guarantee a transparent distribution of financial resources and protection of intellectual property rights. The project’s token sale will be held from March 14 to April 30, 2018.
