So I would say at a macro sort of perspective, we will see the blockchain industry be worth
more than it ever historically has. I know so far it's reached, I think, just over three trillion.
I expect to see that trend sort of grow as adoption and understanding grows in markets.
So the total market cap of everything will be increasing, in my opinion. I expect to see bitcoin
and Ethereum market caps come closer together in value. Ethereum has a bunch of use cases,
with Ethereum 2.0 launching and with all the layer two sort of scaling. Many of the problems that are
holding it back today will be solved, which means it can get much faster adoption than bitcoin,
potentially just because it covers more potential use cases. Actually, to expect to see big growth
from NFTs, especially to some of the slightly smaller market cap blockchains like Solana or
Cardano Cardano, who now support smart contract functionality, which is a big change allowing
their ecosystem to grow. Solana has obviously had some teething pains, but increasing nicely
in the NFT space in a few of the other players. I think Polkadot will also grow massively now
they've just launched their parachain auctions. Now, the real benefit of Polkadot and the sort
of 100 pair chains that can plug in there can be realized. So I think they'll have a very good year
for smaller parts of the market for some of the smaller tokens. Expect to see people become more
knowledgeable. The market in general is evolving its knowledge, and there's much
more of a focus on a degree of fundamentals now, rather than pure speculation and hype.
And I expect to see this trend continue. As part of this, I think there'll be more and
more of a movement away from just day trading tokens and actually looking at some of the
fundamental utility of the utility tokens, people getting involved in staking and generating yield
in smart ways to actually earn additional tokens and maybe trade a bit less frequently, but
actually a mass more tokens. I think there's more and more of that that's really started to happen.
We'll see significant expansion in decentralized finance.
This is one because of things keep innovating, and many good projects have now launched
to. It takes a while for adoption, but three, and potentially most importantly,
the regulatory landscape evolving decentralized finance. Obviously, certain elements of it
really need a sort of fundamental structured framework. The regulators have been coming
closer and closer to their understanding here, and I believe with improved frameworks and more
clear rules next year. Not only will it mean more investment can flow into build more projects,
but also the adoption of different decentralized finance mechanics will become significantly
more derisked for any sort of significant existing companies and the layer two space,
the sort of blockchain scaling space adoption. I think it just be mostly more adoption. We're
already seeing significant growth in user numbers this year, and maybe some of us will actually get
to near full capacity because most of the networks can do thousands of transactions
per second right now. But the adoption is just not there to actually prove those use cases.
So hopefully we'll see the first use cases next year where we really are doing sort of serious
transaction volume numbers. I think there'll be more and more of a move to interoperability
between public blockchain networks. We're seeing sort of siloed value the Ethereum dominance across
different DeFi markets is decreasing. Obviously, the various sort of smaller players have started
catching up. And now what we're starting to see, even what we've seen sort of in some NFT
sales is you've got siloed pockets of community. You have maybe the Cardano community in Ethereum
community and the bitcoin community, but creating the infrastructure to make all of
these communities interoperable with each other. I know that's a big part of Polkadot's vision.
I think that will become more and more important because this DeFi assets need to draw on the
biggest liquidity pools possible. Nft communities need to reach as many eyeballs as possible.
Different assets need to be able to talk to each other across these siloed pockets of value.
So interoperability is going to become front and center
in the sort of blockchain conversation, in my opinion. And then I think we'll see more and more.
We've really started to see more of a move from use cases being built on private, permissioned
change to more public open blockchains. Many you have mentioned sort of one problem was of
scalability, right? It's much simpler to scale things in a private, permissioned environment,
but those problems have mostly been solved now in market. The other one is around security,
but we've seen that bitcoin. The Ethereum, these are secure networks, people aren't stealing money
out of people's wallets, it's more just scams that make people send their money to the wrong places.
So the public networks are becoming or users are knowing how to use them better user experience or
on key management is improving. The security has been a proven model now for a while,
so I think we'll see more of a transition to using public open blockchain rather than permissioned
and private blockchains, much like we saw when the internet first launched, right? There are
a bunch of private, permissioned internets, essentially just between various individuals,
but the one that ultimately won was the fully connected, interoperable
internet connecting everything together. And I think that's what public blockchain will
do to the private, permissioned space, too. So, yeah, lots of different things, lots of growth,
more acceptance in terms of regulation, consumer understanding, user experience,
making adoption much easier. And I think next year, if we had to pick
one field in particular that I think is really going to shine, I would say it's kind of spread.
It depends how you want to categorize things. Decentralized finance, or NFTs, in particular,
NFTs bring blockchain really to the mainstream, how people understand it when they couldn't
sort of get their heads around the in depth sort of complex model. And it's all
DeFi ecosystem that really gives this its core value liquidity to previously illiquid assets,
but also all the other financial building blocks. We need to really build advanced, sophisticated
communities within the blockchain. So those are my predictions for 2022. Thank you for listening.