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Bloomberg’s market expert Eddie van der Walt believes that 2021 saw a real breakthrough for cryptocurrencies as crypto became a firm “part of the financial furniture”.
Bloomberg's Eddie van der Walt on the outlook for crypto in 2022 pic.twitter.com/kjeJOxPDEx
— Bloomberg Crypto (@crypto) January 4, 2022
Crypto is favored by institutions compared to a few years ago
Compared to just a couple of years ago, when institutions and financial experts used to say that Bitcoin and other crypto “are going to zero” and they are “worthless”, the situation has changed for the better a lot by now. In 2021, the crypto industry saw multiple ETFs arrive, including the first Bitcoin futures-based one in the US approved by the SEC. Besides, the expert says, there have been several IPOs in the crypto space with Coinbase exchange being one of them.
Walt confirmed that now there is a whole infrastructure out there that has allowed financial institutions to start entering the space (and Bitcoin in particular) with big amounts of funds.
For these particular reasons, Eddie van der Walt stressed, 2021 was a real breakthrough for crypto and has set up a bright future for this space.
“Entering the teenage years for crypto”: Cardano and Ethereum
In 2022, Walt believes, cryptocurrencies are going to define “what they mean, what they are and what we will do with them”, obviously hinting at specific utility.
In particular, Walt mentioned such top-tier blockchains as Cardano and Ethereum, saying that they “have taken on the NFT space and have moved in the narrative a little bit forward in terms of what we are gonna do with cryptocurrencies”.
He did not mention, though, dapps and smart contracts that Ethereum has been the first platform for and Cardano now allowing devs to use them on it as well after the Alonzo upgrade in September, aside from just letting users create non-fungible tokens.
“US regulation is a big risk factor for the cryptocurrencies”
Since regulators are only awakening to decide how to handle the crypto space, in the US in particular, Walt has called regulation a big risk factor for crypto, since they have not been regulated before. Therefore, at the moment there is a sort of regulatory arbitrage between crypto and regular assets. And that, according to the Bloomberg expert, could be negative for the cryptocurrencies in the short term.
However, in the long-term prospect, regulation for crypto assets would be good, he believes, since it would allow more investors – both institutional and private ones – to get involved with them.