2021 has been the best year for the crypto industry in terms of market cap expansion, development, and adoption. The number of assets that comprised this financial sector, from Bitcoin to Ethereum and others, reached a total market cap of over $3 trillion over this period.
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Although a major milestone, achieve in a little over a decade, there are still obstacles and goals ahead as the year 2022 approaches. Sam Bankman Fried, CEO at crypto exchange FTX, attempted to present a roadmap for this industry in the coming years.
Bankman Fried began by reviewing the achievements that this sector starting from its “solid user base”, there is an estimate of over 200 million people around the world that own cryptocurrencies. Second, the implementation of smart contracts allowed crypto to transition from “digital gold to Web 3.0” and other use cases, including NFTs and DeFi.
In that sense, there is a lot of potential for crypto applications and use cases as store of value, fast payment, information transfer, tokenized assets, and others quoted by the CEO at FTX. This has brought “an enormous amount of attention” from mainstream media and politicians around the world, for better or worst. SBD asked his followers via Twitter:
An enormous amount of attention. Seriously, crypto punches _way_ above its weight on this one. Crypto market cap is ~2.5T, less than Apple or Microsoft. Which gets more attention, though?
Amongst the first objectives in the crypto roadmap for 2022 and beyond, Bankman Fried mentioned regulations. Over the years, this has been one topic that has seemingly grown tenser and with more hostility from political actors towards crypto and its potential to disrupt the traditional financial system.
SBF thinks both crypto actors and regulators will come out of 2021 with some level of “frustration”. This will need to tackle by the entities working in favor of the industry and, in many cases, in favor of “maintaining the U.S. place” as a hub for innovation.
How Crypto Will Succeed In The Coming Years
The tension and lack of clarity in many jurisdictions will need to be clear in order for crypto to meet its potential. SBF proposed the creation of standard market oversights and a framework that facilitates auditing stablecoins, one of the most controversial topics in crypto this year, and an anti-fraud mechanism to issue tokens.
Much of the proposed, SBF claimed, has already been implemented by the FTX platform. In addition, Bankman Fried addressed scalability as he believes no blockchain is yet capable of reaching “millions of TPS” (transactions per second), the type needed for mass adoption and corporate implementation. He added:
The goal of all of this is to come out stronger. To emerge with customer protection and regulatory clarity in a way that consumers and institutions alike feel comfortable interfacing with the digital asset ecosystem.
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In that sense, SBF claimed to be optimistic that crypto will make good progress and become stronger in the coming years. However, he emphasized the need for every actor to continue to work hard and push crypto into mass adoption using existing platforms and products, such as games and their integration with NFTs.
20) Tapping into the existing userbase of video games could be huge–billions of users and hundreds of billions of dollars each year.
But this only makes sense if it makes the virtual worlds more engaging, not less.
— SBF (@SBF_FTX) December 27, 2021
As of press time, the total crypto market cap stands at $2.29 trillion with sideways movement during December.
