We have witnessed too much history in 2020, and we also feel too much uncertainty.I believe these prospects can help readers find a little certainty among many uncertainties.
Bitcoin will be more valued by institutions and become one of the major asset allocation tools.
The skyrocketing bitcoin price at the end of 2020 also allowed us to see many institutions, including the world's largest bitcoin trust fund Grayscale, payment giant PayPal, and Micro Strategy and Square, which have made huge investments in bitcoin. The institutional investment and support for Bitcoin has convinced many people that Bitcoin is becoming the gold of the digital world. Of course, in addition to Bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies have also received the attention of institutions, and cryptocurrencies may become a major asset allocation tool. Therefore, in 2021, we can boldly predict that Bitcoin will be more valued by institutions and become one of the major asset allocation tools.
Ethereum 2.0 development progress may not be as good as expected.
On December 1, 2020, the Ethereum beacon chain was created, which marked the official start of the 2.0 version of the roadmap for Ethereum. According to the Ethereum development roadmap, Ethereum 2.0 will go through three main stages from Phase 0 to Phase 2. Among them, the main task of Phase 0 is to launch a beacon chain with PoS as the consensus mechanism; Phase 1 will mainly solve Ethereum's transaction congestion problem has improved scalability; Phase 2 is a continuation of Phase 1, and will continue to implement the sharding mechanism.
However, Ethereum 2.0 is not a simple upgrade, nor is it a short-term change that can be achieved at one time, but an unusually huge system engineering that may take years or even longer. Therefore, considering the high difficulty of the entire system upgrade, we believe that the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade needs to do a lot of work in 2021, and its development progress may not be as expected.
The Diem (Libra) stablecoin is officially launched
In 2019, Facebook launched the stablecoin project Libra and released the project white paper, which immediately attracted the attention of regulators around the world. Many countries expressed different degrees of concern and concern about Libra. In April 2020, the Libra Association updated the project white paper. Compared with the content of the first edition of the white paper, the updated white paper added a lot of design on compliance. Some people think that this is a compromise on supervision. In December 2020, Libra changed its name to Diem again. This move is intended to emphasize the independence of the project and once again strive to obtain regulatory approval. At present, Diem (Libra) has made sufficient preparations for the launch of a single stable currency in 2021.
Public chain technology has achieved breakthroughs, and scalability and interoperability have been greatly improved.
In the technical field of public chains, there has always been a widely discussed technology "impossibility triangle", that is, "scalability", "security" and "decentralization" cannot be achieved at the same time. Among them, the scalability of the public chain has been criticized the most, that is, the on-chain transaction processing efficiency is too low. Ethereum 2.0 considers using sharding to solve the scalability problem. Another problem related to scalability is cross-chain interoperability. The launch of Polkadot's mainnet in 2020 provides a reference solution for the interoperability problem. In 2021, we expect that public chain technology will achieve breakthroughs in scalability and interoperability, and the overall public chain performance will be greatly improved.
The development of the alliance chain pays more attention to the real needs of the industrial application side and drives the development of related technologies with demand.
At present, the development of domestic blockchain technology is dominated by consortium chain related technologies and has made considerable progress, but there are still shortcomings in specific scenarios and landing applications. On the one hand, blockchain technology is still in the initial stage of application, and it needs to solve effective adaptation with existing technologies and application scenarios; on the other hand, on the demand side of blockchain technology applications, there is still a vast demand space.
The on-chain of physical assets or the digitization of assets will expand exploration and practice, and the establishment of digital asset exchanges will enter the stage of substantial advancement.
With the development of the digital economy, after land, labor and capital, data has been recognized as the fourth major production factor, which means that data will increasingly reflect the "asset" that can create value. How to digitize existing physical assets and capitalize data will become an important issue for market players to think about in the future, because the breadth and depth of data also determines the breadth and depth of assets. In terms of asset digitization, digital identity and digital right confirmation are inseparable from blockchain technology. Therefore, in 2021, we expect that physical assets on the chain or asset digitization will expand exploration and practice, and facilitate the establishment of trading venues and markets for data asset transactions. Will enter the substantive advancement stage.
DeFi leads the continued development of the open financial model, and the application of insurance will become a new hot spot.
DeFi ushered in an explosion in the second half of 2020, leading the development of the encrypted digital currency market. Nowadays, with the repeated record highs of Bitcoin prices, the attention of DeFi has been weakened, but this is not necessarily a bad thing for the DeFi ecology.As more and more mainstream institutions pay attention to technology-driven emerging financial models such as DeFi, their open, credible, and fair business concepts and service awareness to protect user data will also influence and change traditional finance to a greater extent.
However, with the evolution of blockchain technology and the deepening of industrial applications, the formulation of related technologies and industry standards will be further accelerated.
