What Will be the Major Factor of User Adoption of Blockchain Technology in 2020?

It’s now the year 2020 and crypto isn’t dead yet (far from it), unlike what most critics have predicted. The number of case studies where blockchain technologies found their market fit isn’t that big, sure (yes, that harsh reality is still the same right now), but the industry is doing quite well overall. Over the past few years we’ve cut through the hype, eliminated the “get rich fast” scams, and continued improving our products.

And to start off the New Year, I’ve taken the liberty of chatting with blockchain founders from different niches to ask them about how they view crypto user adoption in the coming years. It’ll certainly be interesting to read their predictions for the year and then compare it to what will actually happen at the end of 2020. (Source of the featured image: https://binaryinformatics.com/emerging-blockchain-trends-2020/)

Here is a tagged list of the founders as well as a brief description of their respective industry:

Infrastructure:

Li Jiang, COO of harmony.one - The next-generation blockchain platform
Humayun Sheikh, Co-Founder and CEO of Fetch.ai - The blockchain platform for the IoT world
Matthew Niemerg, CEO, Co-founder of alephzero.org - A novel DAG protocol that aims to solve known blockchain issues.
Guillaume Thuillet, CEO of Nokenchain - The simplest platform for token issuers
Johann Polecsak, Co-Founder and CTO of QANplatform - The quantum-resistant, enterprise-ready, energy-efficient blockchain platform.

Fintech:

Ben Jones, CEO, CTO & co-founder bitwala.com - A blockchain banking platform
Nemr Hallak, from volentix.io - A cross-blockchain decentralized exchange
Henry Vogel, from Keevowallet.com - The most secure and easy-to-use crypto wallet that’s like having a private Swiss bank account in your pocket [... but without the bank]
Edmund Lee, CEO of c-trade.com - The most seamless cryptocurrency derivatives trading platform.
Brian Kerr, Co-Founder Kava.io - A DeFi platform for crypto assets
Jonathan Loi, Founder of Level01.io - Peer-to-peer derivatives exchange
Amarildo Caka, CEO of Capitual.com - A crypto investments and payment platform
Chris Mack, from Levidge.com - A crypto derivatives exchange

Consumer products:

Tony Tran, Founder of Alfa Enzo - A marketplace that lets anyone buy and sell attention.

Real sector:

Bogomil Alexandrov, from laycan.com - Blockchain for logistics
Mark Lloyd, CEO of Max Property Group and Max Crowdfund - Blockchain for real estate

Business Services:

Prof. Srdjan Vukmirović, CEO of Prometheus - B2B platform to integrate databases to the blockchain
Kade Almendinger, Co-Host of darksideofthehodlmoon - A popular crypto podcast.
Quentin Herbrecht, Blockchain Speaker, Professor, advisor & CEO at Markchain - Marketing agency for blockchain related projects.
Marvin Steinberg, Founder & CEO of steinberginvest - One of the leading Security Token Offering (STO) experts in the industry.
Alex Randarevich, co-founder of FCH Business Network - business consortium of Companies, NGOs and Charities unified by the common goals of sustainable economy, financial inclusion, inclusive universal digital identities and fair practices.

But first, let’s summarize some of the fundamental facts regarding the use of blockchain technology:

1. The number of crypto users:

Based on a Statista report, there are more than 42 million wallets registered so far (it’s still six times less than the 286 million accounts registered with PayPal), and we are still seeing linear growth. But this isn’t a very accurate metric for a few reasons: most of the wallets were created and never used, and some users have several wallets.

A more accurate analysis was conducted by Alex Lielacher in his article from Feb 2019. If we apply the same proportion to the current numbers, we’ll find that the possible number of active Bitcoin users should be around 33 million (1.3x growth since 2019). Given that Bitcoin is still the dominant coin, this amount is close to all active blockchain users.

TLDR: 33 million

2. The most active blockchain users:

Fintech and crypto exchanges, followed by mining hardware manufacturers, are still dominant in the crypto market given their huge user base. A more accurate analysis of the big companies that experiment with blockchain can be found in the “Blockchain 50: Billion Dollar Babies” article by Michael del Castillo.

3. And what about blockchain appliances for a non-fintech field?

2017 was full of expectations about how blockchain tech will bring average users over to the distributed world and give them power over their data. Projects like Steemit, Brave browser, Storj, and Status were quick to the scene with their prediction of a decentralized future for all users.

But now it’s 2020, and StateoftheDApp shows that most of the above products have a maximum of 1,000 users - that’s not great. I think it’s safe to say that, in 2020, blockchain is not yet here for B2C products.

Here is an interesting read from Kevin Maney, who explained this lack of blockchain adoption using the “adjacent possible” theory.

But when all is said and done, blockchain is here to stay for the long term, and we just need to find the areas aside from fintech where it can grow to new heights in 2020. Below are some predictions from blockchain project founders who manage their startups on a daily basis and have firsthand experience of the industry from the inside.

To summarize these experts’ opinions, we can see the following trends:

1 said that “Dex technology will be the major growth factor in 2020.”

7 said that “simple UI and ease of usage should be implemented to attract more users.”

5 said that “we need more blockchain-based services (killer apps) to accelerate growth.”

1 said that an “increase of STO will attract more investors, which will lead to the total growth of blockchain users.”

3 said that “DeFi will be the leading factor.”

2 said that “Crypto derivatives will attract more users in 2020.”

You can read the full predictions below:

Bogomil Alexandrov, from laycan.com and CargoCoin

“The major growth factor for user growth in the blockchain space in 2020 will be the launch of more and more blockchain-based services, as well as improvements to the existing platforms and services. In the past two years, a lot of companies have been working on the projects to deliver blockchain-enabled services to the market.

As the adoption of cryptocurrencies increases on a monthly basis, we are now seeing large corporations that are not directly related to the crypto boom of 2017 starting to accept payments in Bitcoin. There are even very large traditional companies now accepting or are planning to start accepting Bitcoin and/or other cryptocurrencies in the very near future.

Looking from our own perspective, our global shipping platform Laycan.com is expected to start processing blockchain smart contracts in 2020, which will be a strong signal for the transport industry, which is moving very slowly towards digitalization. Laycan, powered by CargoCoin, will greatly improve logistic processes, binding all necessary documents and payments with escrow functionality, thus reducing delays and fraud, which currently costs billions of dollars each year. Reducing the transportation costs and associated risk will reduce the expenses of the manufacturers, allowing consumer prices to be reduced.

Furthermore, reducing delays and associated costs would have significant environmental impact globally, as each ship regularly "loses" at least a few days per trip, which results not just in costs but also air and water pollution by running the idle ship.

In 2020, I expect to see an increase in blockchain adoption and usability, which will be to everybody's benefit, resulting in lower costs and improved transaction timing.”

Nemr Hallak, from volentix.io

“In cryptocurrency markets, the year 2020 will witness an increasing emphasis on decentralized exchange technology.

The year 2019 demonstrated a growing popularity of DEX applications. The number of transactions on Ethereum DEXs more than tripled in the first half of 2019, from $90M in January 2019 to $300M in June 2019. DAI monthly transaction volume reached $2.5 billion in November 2019.

The most popular centralized cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, launched a DEX in Feb 2019. By year’s end, Binance DEX had more than 120 trading pairs, having reached a high of $520M in a 24-hour trading volume.

DEXs play an important role in how one views national economic failures, such as those seen in Greece, Venezuela, and Lebanon. People are losing trust in conventional local currencies and banking systems.

The Volentix Digital Assets Ecosystem launched the VDEX decentralized exchange in 2019. It is initially facilitating easy, unrestricted exchange between EOS-based assets. Volentix is developing VDEX as a peer-to-peer, cross-blockchain digital application freely adaptable via open-source code repositories on GitHub. Extensive details are available at www.volentix.io.”

Li Jiang, COO for harmony.one

“In a very short space of time, we went from a space deeply devoted to solving the specific problem of peer-to-peer cash to one that could seemingly solve everything. 2017 - the year of everything - was quickly followed by 2018, the year of nothing, where it seemed nothing was real, nothing worked, nothing was ready, nothing was a fair destination for the value of 99% of tokens. 2019 was the year that something did emerge, and that something was DeFi. Whether that narrative has enough power to fuel user adoption beyond the few who take part in these experiments remains to be seen.

The prevailing mood within the blockchain world seems to be ‘this will take time,’ which is an understandable contrary position after the froth of 2017. However, when you see Facebook moving into the space with Libra, a chinese digital currency due any moment, and the general air of instability around major economies, there’s probably an argument for saying that the opposite is possible: ‘this will happen very, very fast.’ If an entire nation of over 1 billion people brute forces the adoption of blockchain tech, then this could very well ignite a fintech arms race and force us to innovate solutions that actually work for real people in the real world. No more experiments. Deliver or die.

Cross-fi remains a key focus for Harmony. Fast, scalable payment solutions particular across borders with instant finality. This remains a major pain point across all markets, emerging or otherwise. Stablecoins remain the most tantalizing crypto primitive in the payment space, and we see huge potential here in bringing ‘crypto’ benefits to the more traditional world.

For all that, there’s every chance that the true catalyst for user growth will come from a place where no one’s looking or ever even anticipated. We’re still waiting for a genuine innovation in the UX side. Instinctively, eSports and the world of in-game currencies/items feel like rich territory to explore and bring rarefied experiments of DeFi into the hands of mainstream consumers. Gamified finance is an exotic idea, but gamers will understand the mechanics of such a system better than most.”

Prof. Srdjan Vukmirović, CEO of Prometheus

“In order to accelerate user growth for blockchain technology, we have to make it easy to integrate it into the existing products and platforms. It can be done effortlessly with the Prometheus platform. Also, blockchain-related projects need more coverage in media that are not tech-oriented, and for that, we need to solve the everyday problems though products that users are already familiar with and just extending it with blockchain repositories where there is a trust issue.

The big issue with user growth for blockchain is the lack of trust in project execution, that is why most ICOs fail these days. Prometheus is at the private sale stage now by itself and guarantees money back if we do not reach the Soft Cap and independent reviews that will monitor project progress.

Prometheus description:

The Prometheus platform enables effortless integration of any existing source of information with the blockchain. Prometheus has created a fully functional MVP that allows the user to connect to the database through a few clicks, select a table and column to transfer to a blockchain, select the type of blockchain (Prometheus, Ethereum, Cardano, Stellar...), and choose whether the action will be performed only once or repetitively.”

Amarildo Caka, CEO of Capitual.com

“Here at Capitual, we are offering our users a unique experience as they are able to use our platform like they would with their traditional online banking. The only difference being they can purchase crypto and transfer those funds around the world to other Capitual users instantly. The platform is live and running with everything in order, so if you want to see the crypto scene grow, then you definitely need products like Capitual .

Ready. It is easy and fast to use

Our focus is in Latin America, Brazil, and the EU. Capitual will be launching its own security token via partners in a compliant way.

I also want to add that security tokens will play a significant role in 2020, and we will see some new projects popping up in the market.

On the other side, I’m seeing that because of the instability in the political world, we might see privacy coins play a big role and start becoming adopted as a form of payment.

DeFi will continue to dominate and grow as we see many projects pooling clients’ crypto holdings in a decentralized way, while still allowing them to profit on the dividends.

I dare predict that some banks will start offering some kind of interesting bearing accounts which will involve staking crypto in the background.”

Brian Kerr, Co-Founder Kava.io

“Staking and DeFi will be major trends of 2020, as consumers and investors alike chase after reliable returns and cash flows. Staking and DeFi products will become very accessible for consumers through mobile wallets and exchange integrations in 2020, and they will serve as one of the primary catalysts driving new capital flows into crypto.”

Chris Mack, from Levidge.com

“The Eden of disruptive technology is often associated with speculation on the future value of the technology. We saw this cycle play out in 2017, when investors bought crypto simply because it was going up in price. I expect a new bull market to begin in 2020, but blockchain adoption will continue to accelerate in an upward trajectory due to the fundamental extraction of value from a handful of killer applications.

Over the past few decades, we’ve seen exponential growth in biotech, genetic engineering, energy production, and computer technology. Yet financial services, one of the largest sectors of the economy, has remained stagnant. Capital formation has been largely unavailable to the majority of the world, and I believe that we’ll see the formation of new amazing projects supported by distributed communities that didn’t have access to capital before. I also believe that in 2020 we’ll see institutional grade crypto platforms that combine innovative fintech with traditional financial products, including derivatives. Crypto holders will view their capital differently when they can invest in and trade all asset classes using blockchain technology, and earn more crypto from their existing crypto holdings.”

Jonathan Loi, Founder of Level01.io

“This year will see a more cohesive realignment of blockchain solutions for real needs and solve real pains. As an example, when FOMO was in play throughout 2017, nobody cared that the market didn't need that many privacy tokens. Level01 did in-depth market studies before creating our decentralized finance platform to remove all the frictions surrounding the derivatives and financial markets, such as hidden costs, unfair pricing, data manipulation, etc.

We managed to combine AI with blockchain technology to bring a peer-to-peer derivatives exchanges designed to provide the most fair and secure environment for traders. With Level01, retail traders can now trade with the same efficiency as professionals with our FairSense™ AI estimating the true market value of the contracts they seek to trade, using trusted data from Thomson Reuters.

We think users in 2020 have bypassed the hype surrounding blockchain and cryptocurrency. Projects that introduce real-world solutions to solve actual pain points will be the focus of 2020. This is already apparent with the volume and reception to our recently listed token, LVX”

Guillaume Thuillet, CEO of Nokenchain

“Simplicity and communication will be the two main growth factors in 2020, mainly in French-speaking markets. People do not really yet know blockchain, due to the lack of information from the mainstream media. We are currently working with the Waves blockchain, which we find simple, fast, and inexpensive. Nokenchain's mission is to simplify access for the French-speaking markets and allow anyone to create a token, a cryptocurrency or a blockchain very easily, without computer skills, with support from A to Z.”

Mark Lloyd, CEO of Max Property Group and Max Crowdfund

“At Max Property Group, we strongly believe 2020 will be the year of the security token, driven by an increasing understanding of the value of asset tokenization. There are evident movements in these fields, such as:

- The number of STOs increased 1.5 fold since 2018 (55 registered STOs in 2019 compared to 35 in 2018, compared to only 5 in 2017)

- Amounts raised are distributed amongst more companies ($452 million in 2019 compared to $434 million in 2018 and only $65 million in 2017).

This shows that the industry is maturing and becoming more realistic - all these huge, unreasonable amounts per company are over. Platforms have also developed proper broker-dealer functionalities, like they need to according to US regulations.

On the institutional side of STO issuances, there has been a significant build-up of back-office functionality and overseas infrastructure. July saw the launch of 1X, a first-of-its-kind security token exchange based and regulated in Singapore. August saw the second issuance of a $33.8 million Bond-i by the World Bank. In September, Santander issued a $20 million tokenized bond transacted entirely on the Ethereum public network (CommBank's and Quorum’s were on private networks). September also saw Allinfra, another company partnered with ConsenSys, announce a collaboration with Asia’s largest REIT, called Link REIT

We believe that the biggest sector ripe for disruption by tokenization is the real estate market. There are $217 trillion dollars of property assets on the planet spread across countless land registries, recorded in different languages, and subject to numerous jurisdictional regulations.

There are strong signals that more than billions can be tokenized by the end of 2020, some of them:

- The joint venture between technology providers Fluidity and the digital asset-focused broker-dealer Propellr

- In May of 2019, the first tokenized real estate sale in Switzerland was launched with some reports stating it was the first on the European continent. The venture involved Elea Labs and Swiss Crypto Tokens, and approximately $2.98 million was tokenized

- In the US, Stephane De Baets, President of Elevated Returns, decided to launch a real estate STO after the purchase of the St. Regis Aspen Colorado Hotel.

The traditional real estate market suffers from a lack of transparency, over-bureaucracy, and lack of cross-border communication. We believe that the tokenization of real estate assets can be a practical solution to many of these obstacles and the key to opening up property investment to the global investor community. Essentially creating a worldwide land registry, we believe that many of the world’s properties will be tokenized and recorded on the blockchain by the year 2025. Max Crowdfund (https://maxcrowdfund.com/) is one of the first projects to aspire to this goal. We will be launching a number of security tokens during 2020 and we look forward to being a driving force in the adoption of tokenization in the real estate sector.”

Ben Jones, CEO, CTO & co-founder bitwala.com

The pace of development in the blockchain space is incredible, with new solutions being created every day. 2020 will be the year of the stablecoin with more institutional investors moving into the space and state-backed digital currencies entering the market. Recently, the European Central Bank recently assembled to assess the feasibility and potential outcome of a digital euro. Stablecoins offer all the advantages of cryptocurrencies in terms of speed, cost, and security, but they eliminate the wild price swings of Bitcoin, making them more accessible for mainstream usage. Further, we see more advanced custody solutions that will simplify the day-to-day usage of cryptocurrencies for professional traders and heavy crypto users.

Another area to watch is the decentralized finance (DeFi) space. While 2019 was already an incredible year in terms of new developments, we will see more maturing DeFi applications in 2020, such as collateralized and uncollateralized loans, decentralized exchanges, or blockchain-based derivatives. Also, Europe is also gradually opening up to the idea of cryptocurrencies and DeFi products. We are seeing great progress across Europe and are particularly welcoming the Merkel Administration’s national blockchain strategy, which has been passed recently. Bitwala will carefully assess the introduction of all regulatory compliant DeFi products based on Ethereum in 2020.

Our mission at Bitwala is to make the values of blockchain accessible and easy to use for anyone. At present, we offer the world's first account combining a German bank account, a Bitcoin and Ethereum wallet, and seamless trading options. Our customers can easily buy and sell Bitcoin and Ether - whether online or mobile - with fast cash settlements directly from their bank account. We are building the bank to bridge traditional finance and the new digital economy, and DeFi will play a role in that starting in the year 2020.

Tony Tran, Founder of Alfa Enzo

“We believe growth will come from two obvious sectors: consumer technology and government.

To see mass adoption, a product has to provide a 10x measure of improvement, if not more. Consumers crave amazing, beneficial experiences, which means that most of the world don't want to hear about BFT, protocols, TPS etc. That’s precisely why there's no mainstream movement. The blockchain stack needs to innovate the experience from behind the scenes. This is contrary to how projects run, but this is the reason why our token is the only one on the market with continuing momentum and hasn’t crashed. Projects need to be made to serve the users, not the engineers and speculators. Coins are concepts, and if the concept does not align with an actual product, it will not move the needle.

In the consumer sector, blockchain will go viral if it solves a real pain for a giant market. People demand faster, easier, and better in a beautiful product that they want to return to—products that enhance old habits or create new ones. We will release a product of this caliber this year at the StartupGrind Global Conference in Silicon Valley on February 11th. We’re there as one of the seven featured growth companies, so it’s going to be exciting to watch.

Governments must also issue sovereign cryptocurrencies in order to protect the future of their monopoly—which is about their seat of power—from any disruptive tech that means to dilute it through disintermediation. China will likely take the first step in this race, which will create a forceful reaction for the rest of the world to go cashless.

Read more about our thoughts on this space at enzo.io and download our super app at alfa.io"

Kade Almendinger, Co-Host of the darksideofthehodlmoon Podcast

Having a great UX for the consumer or investor is important. The crypto enthusiasts have been here for a while, and those casually interested in crypto aren’t going to use a Ledger or Trezor. They’ll use a mobile wallet on a second phone. I see big things in 2020 for DeFi, NFTs, and P2P crypto. If you have a great product and market it right, you’ll see success and growth… so long as the regulators in your country get out of the way.

Edmund Lee, CEO of c-trade.com

The major revolution that blockchain technology made for sure was in the investment field. Investors received high-liquid international assets. The birth and death of exchange technology that we saw since 2014 showed us the real product market fit of blockchain technology in the crypto trading niche. Some facts so far:

According to analytical agencies, the number of crypto traders increased from 100,000 to millions during the 2017-2019 year. The number of coins (assets) in that same period increased from hundreds to more than five million. The crypto derivatives instruments take a special part in the trading market. Although highly complex and relatively risky, derivatives instruments are popular among advanced and technical investors because they allow long and short positions for traders to buy protections and enhance yields through various option strategies. Crypto derivative instruments tend to have tighter spread and lower transaction costs.

One of the most important signals on this market is that CME’s launch of Bitcoin options this month, which will be the major factor of growth in the blockchain trading industry in 2020. We expect that the trading volume of crypto derivatives, such as options, will be increased by 50 to 100 times.

Soon, we are going to be launching a new crypto derivatives exchange, C-Trade, which has two unique features that stand out from the crowd:

1. Our exchange processes up to 10 million transactions per second.

2. C-Trade monitors for market manipulation using machine learning.

Get early access now for more bonuses and special offers!

Henry Vogel, from Keevowallet.com

Innovative and disruptive new technologies often take longer than anticipated to begin impacting established industries and players. On the other hand, when they take hold, the pace of change often happens much faster and the disruption they create is much greater than predicted, too. Just think about the internet/e-commerce or wireless/smartphones or streaming video and the impact they’ve had on large, established retailers, computer and mobile handset OEMs and media companies. 2020 may be the year we begin to see blockchain technology begin to take hold and gain mass user adoption across several use cases and sectors.

We at Keevo are passionate about the disruptive power of blockchain technology that enables users to securely own digital assets like cryptocurrencies and easily transfer their self-sovereign digital stores of value anonymously and without the need for 3rd party intermediaries like banks or central governments. In doing so, this will unleash a new economic foundation that is going to have far reaching impact on global economies, governments, wealth distribution and the balance of power. And, beyond this financial revolution, we believe cryptocurrency is just the first use-case for blockchain technology. We see tremendous potential in applying the ability to securely digitize and provide incentives to validate transactions for many other B2C and B2B applications, industries and aspects of life.

But to reach this full potential, we need to fundamentally break the compromise users are currently forced to make between security and ease-of-use. Security increases will come from improvements in multi-factor and multi-sig authentication to deliver truly decentralized identity management at scale. Reduced prices of secure MCUs and increased availability of sophisticated authentication technology like biometric sensors and facial recognition will accelerate this trend in 2020. And, user interfaces will become much more intuitive and easier-to-use along with experiences that will be more accessible and responsive.

Johann Polecsak, Co-Founder and CTO of QANplatform

Blockchain adoption today is where the Internet used to be.

The cryptocurrency decline was good for the market because it taught investors that not all coins are as shiny as they might seem. We always encourage making decisions based on real market value instead of speculation. How do you measure the value of a token without deep knowledge? Look for platforms that can be integrated into enterprise processes to enhance their workflows. That’s how mass adoption happens.

When the Internet started, companies had to integrate the technology to deliver content for users to consume. That’s where we are now with blockchain, but we’re missing platforms that companies can leverage and are capable of operating on a global scale. That’s likely why the ROI of tokens from the top 11 blockchain platforms (WAVES, EOS, NEO, ETH, LSK, ADA, MATIC, FTM, ZIL, TRX, and ALGO) averages more than 1,000 percent.

About QAN

QAN is a quantum-resistant blockchain platform powered by blockchain fintech brand Centrum Circle. QAN uses Lattice cryptography, making it resilient to quantum attacks that could become possible within the next five years, and which all major crypto networks are vulnerable to.

QAN's IEO is live on the BitBay launchpad.

Humayun Sheikh, Co-Founder and CEO of Fetch.ai

We’re at the exciting point where it is becoming self-evident what blockchain brings to the world. It’s the ability to provide scale, decentralized security and ownership, and an underlying architecture that can be combined with other innovative technologies relating to identity, claims, and AI in order to enhance our lives. Using the Fetch.ai platform, we can now intelligently connect the components of the economy, delivering the lessons and insights from those connections to everybody - not just to a dwindling, centralized few. This is incredibly exciting, and 2020 is the year where blockchain and its associated technologies will increasingly be seen as valuable components for building so much more.

Of course, our ability as a community to focus on this and deliver a welcoming committee that makes this contribution obvious and easy to leverage will be a key part of how quickly and seamlessly adoption occurs. We see 2020 as the year when the entire space matures: free of 2017’s ICOs, and with a more sensible view toward regulation, taxation, and application. It’s also when the application areas already being adopted by businesses start to affect our daily lives, transforming finance and increasing our utilization of the excesses in the economy.

Quentin Herbrecht, Blockchain Speaker, Professor, advisor & CEO at Markchain

“..Not sure that 2020 is ready for mass adoption yet, but the importance of working on it is high. From my point of view the key factor allowing the adoption of the technology is the rise of practical « killer-apps » beyond speculative trading, through a very simple use, allowing everyone to shop with crypto for example. At the moment most of these long-awaited killer-apps in various fields have turned out to be below expectations, and often too ineffective.

Crypto-currencies should be easier to use than they are today. Ideally, you wouldn't even realize that you are using cryptocurrencies.

But on top of that, there are still a number of problems within the industy. Scalability, of course, will be very helpful for widespread adoption, but privacy remains another issue.

Once more and more people will use cryptocurrencies, they will also understand how important the lack of confidentiality in currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum is.

When they will realize that all their transactions will be completely transparent, that everyone can see who pays who and how much, it will be a big problem for everyone. Fortunately, there is a lot of work on several privacy protocols such as proof of zero knowledge to overcome these obstacles, and we’re proud to help some of them with Markchain.io ..”

Matthew Niemerg, CEO, Co-founder of alephzero.org

“..Advancements in solving major challenges will be crucial for user growth.

For retail consumers, using digital assets as a payment solution is hindered by clunky interfaces, slow confirmation times, low merchant adoption, and nearly always requires one to be a security expert in private key management. We're starting to see clever key management solutions using distributed threshold signatures and that will help improve the user experience for those not as technically minded. In addition, we've seen a lot of improvement with the UI / UX compared to the original Bitcoin-QT wallet days.

Finally, a lot of people do not know what platforms or who they can trust. We are seeing more protocols and platforms emerging every day, often with claims of improved efficiencies and higher throughput and low confirmation times. Unfortunately, these claims often come without formal proofs or even a way to independently verify claims. Even though peer-review provides additional vetting for claims that are made, the problem with formal proofs is that not everyone is an academic and people do not understand all the technical jargon. While 2020 will see more formalism for protocols, whether for consensus or for DeFi applications, and this will guide users on who they can trust, there will be better educational campaigns to make all this knowledge more accessible...”

Marvin Steinberg, Founder & CEO of steinberginvest

"...The reasons for the fall of the ICO were that startups offering tokens in the ICO presented their token as a utility, as fuel in their yet-to-be-launched platform. Making promises that as soon as the ecosystem is fully ready, it will be intensively used and, due to limited supply, will be largely in demand. These times are over. I argue that STOs can restore trust in crypto investors. The main advantages that the STOs will bring are that it will provide regulatory clarity in most jurisdictions and make blockchain projects accountable to their investors. Also consider the traditional institutions that are used to buying securities on the market. Digital shares in the form of security tokens that may be of interest to institutional investors to diversify their portfolio into blockchain startups. Obviously, the security tokens can have a much broader impact on the future growth of the blockchain, but before STOs gains momentum, clarity is needed to allow this new mechanism to flourish..."

Alex Randarevich, co-founder of FCH Business Network

Over the last few years we saw a progression with the rise of decentralized applications such as on-chain governance projects and prediction markets in 2016, the rise of ICOs and exchanges to list them as a main theme of 2017, centralized exchanges fortifying their positions against slow but sure rise of DEXes and non-custodial exchanges in 2018, and finally a slow build-up in security offering and markets for them in 2019. The big crypto-winter of 2018-2019 also served as a Big Purge, annihilating unsustainable ideas, mismanaged ICOs and outright scams like a wildfire, leaving a fertile ground for survivors to flourish.

At FCH Network, we started back in 2017, with our view about adoption, seamless integration and doing business overall on blockchain to solve real-world issues for companies transitioning into a digital asset ecosystem. These solutions include: convenient and safe user onboarding and retention in the secure mobile app featuring a reliable, decentralized digital identity, allowing a full control of the private data, password-less authentication and digital signing, decentralized KYC and accredited investor onboarding platforms, FIPS-140-2 digital asset wallet with hardware-grade security, asset issuing and tokenization, and many more operating on top of the world’s only high-performance blockchain with the hybrid PoS/dPoS cross-chain consensus and 51% attack protection.

As we move into 2020, we see that the slow rise of security assets and Security Token Offerings will become inevitable, becoming a mainstream solution by 2021-2022 and potentially replacing traditional IPOs and corporate bond offerings. This will require a massive infrastructure to be built fast and little siloed solutions with in-house KYC and user database won’t suffice. Comparable to US stock exchange network, where dozens on exchanges, dark pools and broker-dealers are connected into a massive network providing with the universal best bid and offer quotation across the system, STO ecosystem needs to become a scalable, cross-platform technology, allowing for decentralized approach in Identity management, KYC, asset transfers and premissioning layer on top of it to make it work.

FCH Network with its solutions, being featured in the industry beacons such as Forbes and Cardrates, focuses on delivering such tools to partners helping them to become successful in this new ecosystem, relying on solid foundation of proven methodology and multi-decade experience in intech,
Banking, Trade Finance and Security of its experts and founders. We are currently onboarding new network partners until April 1st 2020. Any companies with an innovative solution, seeking exposure and willing to create a transparent environment in the blockchain sphere are welcome.

The author is not associated with any of the projects mentioned.