After the euphorya phase that affected the late 2017, a sobering feeling seems to have descended and washed all expectations and optimism from the market

Winter has come

Some minor corrections (that took little time to recover) contributed to making some investors lazy and confident during the course of 2017. This complacency continued until February 2018’s drop in the market, which was the first sign that the end of the bull market had arrived and the bears would rule for the next period of time.

In hindsight, and putting aside pure price speculation, we could also acknowledge that a series of events took a negative toll on the market and industry generally during this time.

• Bitfinex endless accusations and the investigation launched by the US
• The delay of Ethereum’s Constantinople hard fork
• The crackdown on ICOs
• The recent Bitcoin Cash’s fork  aka the “Hash Wars”
• Regulatory uncertainty
   which raised concerns that big players are in control of the market. Another important factor that needs to be considered was the introduction of futures, which made shorting crypto assets much easier and accessible (first BTC but later on ETH and others on Bitmex for example).

The bear market sadly also affected many companies which had to lay off employees in order to catch up financially to this new reality.

What about now?

It’s certainly not all bad news.
One could argue that with a more restrained approach to valuations in the industry, the focus has shifted to what is really important; development. This will make the mass adoption possible and bring a deeper understanding of new financial possibilities that cryptocurrencies and blockchain hold.
there are factors that did influence a lot in 2018:

• Utility tokens vs Security tokens
• safe haven from volatility in Stable Coins
• scalability issues that needed confrontation
• scam ICOs
• lightning network

2019 and beyond

The big issue here is that it is impossible (or at least very hard) to put a real world value to assets like Bitcoin at least as understood in the traditional financial world. That doesn’t mean there is no value, but right now it must be conceded conceded that most of the current valuation is based on future usage and potential.

Concepts like decentralisation, privacy, direct ownership and censorship resistance are starting to pop up on everyones radar especially with mainstream media slowly starting to understand why it is so important moving forward.

As more infrastructure is built on top of blockchain technology (and as long as scalability solutions allow it) these new digital economies and companies will start generating real revenue and therefore real, quantitative demand. Steem is only one small example of how this is possible and what is working.

And while nobody can say exactly when or how will it happen, one thing is for sure — it will happen one block at a time.

So hopefully we will all be there to bear witness (bull witness would be better though, right??)

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