Looking back at 2017, it was the year the world really discovered crypto-currencies. In 2018, it will be the year they go mainstream.
Right now, there are an estimated 10 million people with crypto wallets. Most of them hold Bitcoin, and are basically doing nothing other than watch it go up. Unless you are living in Venezuela it’s not indispensable for day to day transactions.
This is going to change in 2018. With over 10,000 new ICOs happening in 2018, there will be a TON of apps that have their own currency. People will start using these apps (for renting apartments, buying services, playing games, and in app purchases). This is going to drive A LOT of people to the token platform.
Still doubting? Snap just announced a blockchain platform strategy. That’s a platform with 166 Million daily active users.
This is not going to be an incremental change. This is a jump. The average person is soon going to have a wallet with coins in it. Why? Because it’s not only free, it pays you money.
While 2017 might have been the year of Bitcoin, 2018 may very well be the year of the altcoin. Why? For the simple reason there will be so many of them, and they will collectively be much, much more useful than Bitcoin.
In technological revolutions like this, people argue that the people who make the picks and shovels make money. In the short run, sure, but not in the long run. In the Internet Revolution 1.0, you made ultimately money if you bought Amazon, Google and later Facebook. Not so much the companies building web-site infrastructure tools like Vignette or Sun MicroSystems, the companies building websites like Razorfish or Sapient, or people owning the conferences like Ziff Davis.
So while Ethereum, EOS, Tezos, etc.. might end up being great plays, I think there could also be a next level of apps that end up being even more valuable. We just can’t identify them yet, because the true impact of the “token economy” has yet to hit.
Once 100 million people have wallets, and these wallets are connected to app ecosystems that use tokens, it will be inevitable that the entire world is tokenized. And I think 2018 is the year this inevitability becomes manifest.
