’s biggest banks and financial institutions are doing just that — preparing for a day when cryptocurrencies could potentially become a significant means for the exchange of value, and to ensure that they’re not left out in the event that such a revolution takes place.
With no shortage of hindsight, 2017, when Bitcoin reached its then all-time-high of close to US$20,000 can be officially declared a cryptocurrency bubble. To be sure, 2017 saw no shortage of incredibly important projects, many of which have matured since then, but also no lack of over-hyped and marketed shams or outright scams with at most a veneer of technology or practical use cases.
Fast forward to our current epoch and application is coming at the expense of hype — investors have become more savvy and cryptocurrency project teams more credible.Technological use cases for both cryptocurrencies and their underlying blockchains are being developed far more meaningfully and some of the world’s most discerning investors and brightest developers are going all in to the space.
While most of the services which the decentralised internet of cryptocurrencies and the blockchain are promising aren’t available yet for mainstream use, investors can be sure that given sufficient support, development is more an inevitability than a purely aspirational endeavor. But given that development of cryptocurrency is limited by imaginative solutions rather than physical limitations, investors can expect that technology cycles will be far shorter than when it came to the early development of the internet and its most basic applications.In the over five decades since “LO” was transmitted over ARPANET, the centralised internet that we know today has created tremendous value for users but concentrated even more value for platform service providers.