As the world entered economic shutdown and social distancing in 2020 amid the coronavirus pandemic, crypto industry is largely unaffected as most blockchain projects have been operating in a distributed manner. Quantitative easing and other inflationary monetary policies implemented by central governments set a welcoming stage for crypto currencies that offer limited supply and is transparent and easily verifiable. Individuals and institutionals are now re-evaluating Bitcoin and are buying them up. From on-chain data analysis, we see a growing number of addresses owning Bitcoin and whale accounts are also on the rise.
2020 is a year full of surprises. We witness the rise of DeFi, and an endless wave of mainstream adoption. Global cryptocurrency market cap has doubled this year, going from $200 billion to over $400 billion. As we are half way through the last quarter of this year, we reached out to long time participants in the blockchain industry to get their opinions on the most suprising event in 2020.
“Major brands are starting to become aware of the capabilities in Blockchain, whereas historically only crypto projects were taking advantage of this technology. Brands like Topps, Atari, Capcom are all fan favorites and are starting to adopt blockchain and the number 1 reason for adoption is because one platform was able to provide a user experience that is suitable for non blockchain people — with the WAX Cloud Wallet.”
WAX is the leader in the NFT space, having forged partnerships with household brands and created over 1 million NFT assets.
“I am always surprised by the speed at which the blockchain industry is able to innovate and solve challenges, but I think that this has jumped several-fold in 2020. It has been exciting to watch blockchains address scalability, and the speed at which both infrastructure and application-layer projects have adapted has been astounding!
It is something that has been a real focus for us here at EarnBet too, due to a steep increase in demand and the need to process thousands of bets per day.”
EarnBet is the leading blockchain casino, having distributed over $8 million in profits to platform token holders to date.
“The rise of uniswap, the liquidity achieved on a Dex is remarkable. DeFi proved both dangerous and interest to learn from.”
Emanate is a blockchain music streaming platform where smart contracts distribute streaming revenue to artists in real-time.
“I am astonished by how fast DeFi burst into the crypto scene, and for a period of time we had unaudited project coming online every day, and people went nuts farming those seemingly vaporware tokens. What really amazes me is that in this very much unregulated environment we see a lot of good faith shown by the project teams. There are way more good people than bad ones. Crypto industry has come a long way since 2017, and blockchain technology is being used for good than evil.”
Vigor Protocol deploys financial engineering innovations to enhance DeFi lending platform security and useability.
“The excitement and adoption of DeFi certainly surprised me as I was playing around with DeFi platforms on BitShares back in 2016 and didn’t see nearly this same excitement. The collateralized lending was there along with gateway oracles and wrapped tokens, but the aspect of liquidity mining and algorithmic swaps seems to have caught everyone’s attention, including centralized exchanges which may see their business model threatened. CZ and others seem to be putting a lot of attention into DeFi which demonstrates it does have a future, even if it’s a lot of hype at the moment.”
FIO Protocol simplifies blockchain experience so anyone can use crypto products.
“We’re not completely surprised by this but we’re very excited to hear that google cloud has joined EOS. It’s confirmation that major technology companies are not only getting involved with DLT, but that EOS has been deemed adequate for their standards. We think it’s confidence boosting on multiple levels and should be known by players looking to utilize DLT that EOS is an incredible piece of software that the most reputable companies will use.”
Chintai offers institutional grade digital asset technology for global capital markets.
“Block one’s ‘cloud blockchain’ service is very interesting and great for the overall EOSIO application ecosystem. Google joining the band wagon means we’re about to see some very interesting stuff incoming.”
Ultra is the first entertainment platform providing a variety of games industry services under a single roof, accessible through a single login.
“I was really surprised by a massive explosion in the popularity of Yield Farming. The people rushed to mine tokens, which won’t have any profitability in the future. It’s strange for me to watch how people keep spending money on that without analyzing, and don’t understand that they will lose them.”
Prospectors is MMORTS mining game, deployed on multiple blockchains. Players can transfer game world assets through IBC technology.
“Paypal’s decision to start offerring crypto services has been the greatest surprise. It shows that large fin-tech services are now comfortable enough to offer services in the cryptocurrency space, and the industry is maturing at a rapid pace.”
Bloks.io is the leading EOSIO blockchain explorer, offering unparalleled user experience.
“The growth and establishment of the art NFT industry.”
pixEOS provides the art experience of the future.
“Not much as I have been really busy developing my own company on blockchain so I have been away from looking at other projects. I would say the Voice beta launch.”
Eva is a driver-owned ride sharing cooperative powered by blockchain technology.
“Not really sure of an event that got a lot of traction.”
Unbiased fights ethical challenges in AI and big data using blockchain technology.
About the author: Peter Chen is a cofounder of Moran, a blockchain consulting firm founded in 2018 to provide tailored China strategy for our clients.
Moran is an elite team with backgrounds in traditional finance (Goldman Sachs, SAC Capital Advisors), Silicon Valley technology startups (Leap Motion, Subpac), traditional VC (Green Pine Capital Partners) and mainstream media (Xinhua News Agency).
