On January 14, Ari Paul, CIO of cryptocurrency investment vehicle BlockTower Capital, made twelve predictions for cryptocurrency in 2018. With the year coming to a close it’s time to take a look back and see how he performed, bearing in mind his get out clause caveat, “Most will probably be wrong at least on the specific numbers, if not directionally.”
The “Bitcoin dominance index” will bottom between 18-26%, and will end 2018 over 40%. Bitcoin Cash will trade over 0.45 BCHBTC at some point during the year.
Bitcoin’s dominance bottomed at 32% the day before Paul made his prediction and looks set to end the year around 55%. Bitcoin Cash reached its BTC-comparative high of 0.183 BTC in January and then self-imploded in a mass of ego and hash rates.
Score: 0/5
Decentralized exchanges will continue blossoming, but won’t break 5% of total crypto trading volume.
Whether any decentralized exchanges have blossomed is open to opinion, but it’s safe to say that they haven’t exactly overrun the space. Centralized exchanges have very much ruled the roost in 2018, and decentralized exchanges most certainly have not broken the 5% barrier.
Score: 1/5
We’ll have multiple ICO blooms in 2018 centered around different regulatory and governance structures. We’ll see a rebirth of the DAO and a huge boom in asset backed tokens.
ICOs are kind of a dirty word in 2018. It’s fair to say that they have not bloomed so much as bottomed, with regulatory intervention a major reason for this. The DAO has not seen a rebirth and asset-backed tokens have not boomed.
Score: 1/5
Bitcoin will trade at both $6,000 and $60,000 at some point in 2018.
Barring a miracle, half right.
Score: 2.5/5
There will be at least 10 large (>$5 billion network value) ‘corporate coins’ offered by Telegram and other companies.
Telegram, tick. Can we count Venezuela’s Petro? No? One then.
Score: 0.5/5
…a hashgraph based crypto achieving 10%+ market share.
Hasgraph, touted as the next evolution of blockchain, raised $100 million in August but has yet to launch any competitive projects on its network.
Score: 0/5
Dentacoin will become the largest cryptocurrency (kidding).
There’s nothing funny about dentists. Dentacoin is down 98.7% from January. That is funny.
Score: 5/5
Both BTC and BCH will continue to hard fork and >10% of the value of each (if held today) will reside in new offshoots.
Paul nailed this one – Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash hard forked some 24 times in 2018. Data on all resulting coins is hard to get hold of however, so we can’t verify the >10% estimate.
Score: 3/5
We’ll get a blossoming of crypto index funds, such that >6% of all crypto network value will be passively held in some form of index (up from almost zero today.)
New crypto funds certainly have started up this year in, though they probably haven’t blossomed in the bear market. The amount of crypto held by index funds is, unsurprisingly, unknown.
Score: 1/5
There will be a “breakdown” between financial derivatives (futures, options) on crypto and the underlying due to hard fork, network freeze, or extreme manipulation.
Market manipulation was probably behind the bull market in 2017 and was also possibly to blame for the crash in 2018. Futures contracts continue to have an impact on Bitcoin’s price.
Score: 4/5
We’ll see something an order of magnitude bigger than cryptokitties – some collectible or simple game that achieves meaningful adoption.
The closest we got was Crypto All-Stars and maybe Ethermon, but nothing on par with the network-clogging sensation that was Crypto Kitties.
Score: 1/5
Estimates of this are very tough, but global adoption will triple from about 1% to 3% of humans on earth owning cryptocurrency.
Reliable data on this is very hard to come by for obvious reasons, but a survey of 29,000 “internet-connected respondents” found an average of 7% cryptocurrency ownership among predominantly western and eastern countries. We’ll file this under ‘cannot prove or disprove’.
Score: n/a
The Results Are in…
Ari Paul scored 19/55, a miserable 34.54%. It’s almost as if he didn’t see a twelve-month bear market coming. We’ll see next month of he’s willing to repeat his attempt with 2019. If he does, we’ll be there.
