Opinion: 2020, The Return of Cryptocurrency

With today’s bullish trend, which was the third for the month, the crypto market is making a strong case for a comeback in 2020. Although prices are still far away from the heyday of 2017, the market seems to be in a far better condition compared to 2018 and 2019 overall.

This year, we have so far seen three bull pushes. The first one started on January 6th and lasted a couple of days, propelling bitcoin from $7.6k to $8.3k. After a quick rebalance, a new bullish trend emerged on January 14. This one lasted about 4 days and pushed bitcoin from $8.1k to $9.1k. Then the market quickly reverted back a few percentage points before entering into a new bullish trend a couple of days ago.

A year ago

Here’s a few key stats I found when I compared top crypto price charts from this month with January 2019:

• Towards the end of January 2019, bitcoin sat around the $3.5k mark. It now sits close to $9k.
• Ethereum, on the other hand, circled $108, but is now challenging $170.
• Ripple has been through a rough year. XRP ended January 2019 at around $0.3, but now sits at $0.23.
• Bitcoin Cash has more than tripled in value compared to January 2019, when it sat around $120, now pushing towards $400.
• Bitcoin SV has also done very well, having ended the previous January at around $70, while currently sitting at $305.

Except for XRP, the crypto market has progressed substantially over the past year. But can it create for a scenario where the all-time highs of some of these assets are reached? Perhaps.

2020

Bitcoin has more than doubled in value in a year, so reaching that ATH of $20,000 by the end of 2020 certainly seems possible, even plausible. With the new year barely started and bitcoin already up about 25%, we might be position to witness another all-out bull run. However, the crypto market is very well known for its unpredictability, so sudden dumps are certainly not out of the equation.

Yet, the overall outlook seems to be positive. Recently, a new global digital assets consortium was announced at the WEF, confirming the fact that these new financial instruments are no longer to be ridiculed and ignored.

The technology behind cryptocurrency is also doing very well. Blockchain is now being applied on a grander scale, in industries as varied as finance, healthcare, environment protection, and energy.

Blockchain patents are being awarded on a weekly basis, driving the race for the technology’s applicability in the aforementioned business sectors.

And although fraud is higher than ever, albeit caused by one humongous Ponzi scheme, it seems that it hasn’t been able to completely halt progress in the crypto market.

The new bubble

Spectacular and exciting as the times were leading up to it, the crypto bubble burst in the beginning of 2018 struck hard. Countless startups closed operations, not to mention all the investors who lost big, betting late into the bubble. It seemed like it would last forever. Well, it didn’t. And neither will the one that is forming up as we speak.

On days like this, it’s hard to remember how quickly everything went down the drain in 2018. With everything shining in green, critical thoughts and bad memories give way to the monstrous power of FOMO.

Although I personally think that the crypto market has matured somewhat over the past 2 years, it is still obvious that it has a long way to go, with regular 10+ percentage jumps/plunges in prices of assets.

Something this volatile, being a unique, high-risk, and easily-accessible investment instrument, is bound to dance up and down, seemingly effortlessly. Regulators stepping in might help, but also might make matters even worse. Governmental regulation doesn’t really have the best of reputations, often times causing more troubles than simply solving a given problem.

Conclusion

In the end, this January has been a great month for the crypto market. Total digital assets market cap has increased by more than $50 billion, jumping from $191 billion at the beginning of the month to the current $245 billion. Could we see another trillion total market cap by end of the year? It just might be possible.