Blockchain Industry Poised to Become More Competitive in 2022
Cryptocurrencies broke records for growth this year, with Bitcoin and Ethereum leading the pack. According to one blockchain insider, however, 2022 will be the real year for growth and increased competition in the industry. Peter Smith, founder of Blockchain.com, believes competition is set to heat up in the blockchain industry in 2022.
"It's very hard to have lost money in crypto over the last year,” said Smith in an interview with Yahoo Finance. “Some people have managed to do it, but it's quite hard. And so we're going to get into a harder, more competitive environment, I think, over the next year. And that's actually going to be net good for the market because it's going to start separating the good from the bad.”
Smith believes the blockchain market will begin to gravitate toward platforms with the highest growth in usage in 2022, instead of merely investment growth. That trend will begin a separation of companies and platforms built on momentum and hype from those with actual technical value, according to Smith.
He pointed out the recent uptake and growth of a number of blockchain platforms and DeFi applications that have begun transforming the marketplace. Solana, in particular, experienced tremendous growth this year based on the functionality of its blockchain. Touting itself as the fastest blockchain in the world, Solana boasts more than 400 projects including DeFi, NFTs and Web3. It is ranked as one of the top cryptocurrencies on the market based on usability of its blockchain platform.
"We're seeing volume and flow that's outside Ethereum and Bitcoin in our institutional business today, which is really kind of interesting,” said Smith. “And [it] happened a lot faster than we thought it would. That is going to impact prices.”
He added that he expects a level of decoupling to take place within the crypto and blockchain marketplace moving forward, out of necessity.
“Right now everything is trading very correlated,” he said. “So you have this excitement in the space and that's trading up. And there might be slight divergences between this asset and that asset on any given day, but everything is generally trading up. And I think that's the evolution in the market you're going to see next year — is sort of a breakup in the correlation of this asset class.”
Edited by Luke Bellos
