The past week was not the best one in the history of cryptos. Experiencing extreme gyrations, which reached their pick on February 6, cyber assets total supply has lost 66% of its value from January 7’s highs of $828 billion. Although a day later the market stepped on a path of restoration, with total cap seamlessly increasing to $382 billion, it is still not as impressive as indicators of last week’s February 1 with $515 billion in the supply.
Notwithstanding the above, experts console crypto community, saying this year the total market supply will soar to $1 trillion. On top of that, they also predict bitcoin’s bullish future, as it may reach the margin of $50,000 in 2018 after a desperate sell-off bellow $6,000, which occurred at the beginning of this month.
Our top trading bots
Bullish Future: Regulations, Technologies & Futures Boosting Bitcoin
Emailing comments to CNBC, Thomas Glucksmann, the chairman of APAC business development at cyber money exchange Gatecoin, said that it is the regulatory measures which going to affect the market the most.
"Increasing regulatory recognition of cryptocurrency exchanges, the entrance of institutional capital and major technology developments will contribute to the market's rebound and push cryptocurrency prices to all new highs this year," specified Glucksmann
Also, the expert added that particularly these measures and tech trends would prompt BTC to surge up by the end of the year:
"There is no reason why we couldn't see bitcoin pushing $50,000 by December."
Talking about technological innovations, which can prop up bitcoin’s price, Glucksmann meant a solution to the scalability problem, a “second layer” protocol, released last month, Lightning Network. This is expected to happen because of LN ability to speed up bitcoin transactions.
Additionally, the expert said that accelerator of the crypto restoration would also be the emergence of another “bitcoin-futures-like” product on a large exchange. According to Glucksmann, there are already several expectants in the queue, so it only depends on the time when there will be established a virtual assets-backed exchange-traded fund, known as ETF.
Notably, last year December two American exchanges Cboe and CME launched bitcoin-based futures contracts. Later, it was reported that Nasdaq keeps looking into such products.
At the moment, there is no ETF on the crypto market. The issue of establishing such funds, by the way, was recently raised by Jay Clayton, the head of US Securities and Exchange Commission. At US Senate hearing, which took place on February 6, he said that his agency withstood sponsors’ efforts to list bitcoin
ETFs because of some rules that had not been stuck to by the fund's promoters. However, he said, the Commission would review its position once sponsors focus on retail investors less and if the regulations over these funds are stricter than for futures.
But what is unique about ETF is that it could trace the price of an asset and permit people trade coins without the obligatory purchase of virtual currency on an exchange. Famous crypto investors – Winklevoss twins – were the ones whose application for the establishment of ETF was declined in 2017.
Market Cap Rising to Trillion… Before “Winter” Comes
As it is known, last year several cryptos demonstrated incredible results in the growth, with bitcoin soaring by nearly 1,500%, ether going up by more than 8,000% and ripple skyrocketing by 32,000%. At the same time, by the end of 2017, the total crypto market cap surged up by 97% in comparison to the same period in 2016.
Despite such high indicators, the start of 2018 was marked by a devastating sell-off, which caused the prices of cryptocurrencies to go down.
But as Outlier Ventures’ CEO Jamie Burke told CNBC, this year things are going to get better as market supply may reach the trillion-dollar margin. However, another tough period may begin after such a boost.
"We believe after February the market will likely go on a bull run comparative if not greater than last year potentially reaching the trillion-dollar mark before a proper crypto winter sets in where the market becomes more focused on proper market fundamentals," said Burke.
Currently, the total crypto market capitalization is set at $389.7 billion, showing positive traits in its evolution, in comparison to the last week indicators.
