Last year saw a recovery in the crypto market. The new year also started with positive news with the approval of Bitcoin spot ETFs. These topics are likely to be of great importance for the crypto market this year.
• Bitcoin: Spot ETF approval and upcoming halving in view
• Tokenization, blockchain gaming and NFTs trending
• Great potential: Blockchain and artificial intelligence
In a report, Cointelegraph analyzed the five big crypto trends for 2024.
Bitcoin
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In the video, host Jackson names the oldest and largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, Bitcoin, as one of the big crypto trends this year. On January 10, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) cleared the way for Bitcoin spot ETFs. This means that investors are now able to invest in listed Bitcoin funds, which in turn invest directly in Bitcoin. Philipp Sandner from the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, one of the leading experts on digital currencies in Germany, said after the approval, according to dpa-AFX, that the approval had sent a great signal and would create significantly more professionalism for Bitcoin.
Another driving force this year could be the Bitcoin halving. Bitcoin miners receive a certain amount of newly generated Bitcoins as a reward for providing computing power to create new blocks in the Bitcoin network. However, the amount of coins distributed per block is always halved when the miners generate around 210,000 new blocks. The amount of available Bitcoins grows more and more slowly until the upper limit of 21 million coins is reached. This is intended to prevent excessive inflation. The halving takes place approximately every four years. The Bitcoin Sensus site currently dates it to April 21, 2024, based on an average block generation time of ten minutes.
Some experts are therefore optimistic about the Bitcoin price this year. While Mark Mobius was recently cautiously optimistic with a forecast of $60,000, Youwei Yang, chief economist at the Bitcoin mining company Bit Mining, expects Bitcoin to reach the $75,000 mark over the course of the year. According to Antoni Trenchev, co-founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Nexo, Standard Chartered, and Carol Alexander, professor of finance at the University of Sussex, Bitcoin is expected to climb to $100,000 this year. Crypto financial services firm Matrixport expects it to hit $125,000 by the end of the year, and venture capitalist CoinFund thinks $500,000 is possible this year.
Tokenization
According to Cointelegraph’s report, tokenization is also likely to be a trend for 2024. With tokenization, assets, material assets, ownership relationships and rights can be digitally represented on the blockchain. This means that even large real assets can be divided. For example, the value of a property or shares of it can be tokenized and the digital parts of it sold to investors. This means that several people can acquire shares in the property.
Ripple already noted last year in its “New Value Report 2023: Top 5 Crypto Trends in Business and Beyond” that anticipation for tokenized real assets continues to increase. Ripple reported that tokenization of global illiquid assets could represent a $16 trillion business opportunity by 2030, according to Boston Consulting Group. “This potential is reflected in the fact that 72% of respondents expect to use tokenization within their organization as a means to drive innovation in the next three years, across a range of industries including finance, manufacturing, media and entertainment.”
Blockchain gaming
Another topic that is likely to concern the crypto industry this year is blockchain games. According to DappRadar, the blockchain gaming sector continued to grow in 2023. Between May and November alone, investments totaling $1.4 billion were made in the blockchain gaming sector. And according to Decrypt, experts are also optimistic for the gaming sector in 2024. It is assumed that some new games with better gameplay will come onto the market. According to Chris Akhavan of NFT marketplace Magic Eden, three of the Web3 games released this year could be so popular and successful that even large, traditional game studios could become interested in them, which would benefit Web3 research.
Asset management firm VanEck said in its 15 crypto predictions for 2024 that at least one blockchain game is expected to reach more than a million daily players this year. The increased simplicity, combined with large distribution partners, could make it possible for “a blockchain-based game to become a mainstream hit,” say the experts.
The return of NFTs?
After the hype surrounding NFTs in 2021 and 2022, things have recently become quieter around non-fungible tokens. In 2024 there could be a comeback of the unique and non-divisible tokens. Interest in NFTs has increased again at the end of 2023. As DappRadar reported in December 2023, the NFT industry “maintained its upward trend for the second month in a row, recording a significant increase not only in Unique Active Wallets (UAW) but also in trading volume.” The NFT trading volume has increased by 125 percent and has once again approached the $1 billion mark. Meanwhile, the number of sales increased slightly and the average transaction value increased significantly. “This data suggests a significant shift in user behavior, with an increasing propensity to buy and sell NFTs at higher prices,” said DappRadar.
According to CoinDesk, the industry has also become more of a focus for large companies again. More and more traditional financial institutions would also see NFTs as an investment opportunity and so integration into existing financial products could further strengthen the acceptance and stability of the market.
However, according to Cointelegraph, a big difference to the NFT market landscape of 2021 in 2024 is the rise of Ordinals, the NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain, which are already challenging Ethereum’s dominance in this sector. In addition, alternative layer-a-blockchains such as Solana and Tezos are expected to capture an increasing share of the NFT market. In addition, the NFT market is likely to benefit from the previously mentioned areas, tokenization and the GameFi sector.
Blockchain and artificial intelligence
Blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) are two technologies that are already having an impact on our lives and at the same time have the potential to revolutionize numerous industries. According to Cointelegraph, a few companies currently dominate the artificial intelligence market, which has raised concerns about the risks of concentrating the technology in the hands of these companies. But the integration of blockchain into AI applications offers the possibility of decentralizing artificial intelligence. According to Medium, decentralization and transparency can, for example, create “trust in the results and analyzes of AI systems”. The blockchain could also serve as the basis for decentralized data marketplaces from which AI systems could benefit. The management and access to training data for AI models could also be improved with the help of blockchain technology.
An important use case of blockchain technology could be an AI training data book. As CNBC reports, Sheila Warren, CEO of the Crypto Council for Innovation, even described a blockchain-based AI training data book at the World Economic Forum in Davos as a possible “killer use case” and expressed confidence that AI and blockchain will go hand in hand in the future. “I actually believe that the verification of an AI, and in some ways the system of checks and balances within an AI system, will be blockchain-driven and blockchain-supported,” Warren said.
“As AI-generated content becomes more widespread, blockchain technology will prove crucial to maintaining the integrity of information online,” says Cointelegraph host Jackson in the video on the five big crypto trends for 2024. “Given all the potential With use cases at the intersection of AI and crypto, many of which have yet to be discovered, it is a trend that could easily explode in 2024.”
Editorial team finanzen.net
This text is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an investment recommendation. finanzen.net GmbH excludes any claims for recourse.