What does mass adoption mean for the blockchain industry? Has it started yet? If not, what could get it g
What does mass adoption mean for the blockchain industry? Has it started yet? If not, what could get it going?
Yaniv Tal of The Graph
Yaniv is the co-founder and CEO of Edge & Node and a co-founder of The Graph, a decentralized indexing protocol used by blockchains such as Ethereum.
Mass awareness of crypto and Web3 has already started. Celebrities, mainstream media and even the U.S. government are all talking about crypto. The next stage is for usage to exceed speculation, which we see coming very soon. As the Web3 stack solidifies, better applications will become possible with network effects around composable data that will launch Web3 into widespread use.
These quotes have been edited and condensed.
The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the authors’ alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.
Simon Peters of eToro
Simon is the crypto analyst at eToro, a social trading platform that offers investing in both stocks and cryptocurrencies.
“2021 has been a significant year for crypto assets. From the launch of the ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF to El Salvador making Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin its legal tender and the birth of a ‘Bitcoin City,’ crypto is increasingly being adopted as a mainstream financial instrument.
Bitcoin and Ether have seen exceptional returns in the current bull market, reaching fresh all-time highs. Bitcoin, specifically, has achieved some key milestones, with Tesla buying $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin — arguably the most high-profile Bitcoin transaction this year. Additionally, Taproot — the first upgrade in four years to the Bitcoin network — has opened doors for developers to integrate new features improving privacy, scalability and security on the network.”
Sergey Gorbunov of Axelar
Sergey is the co-founder and CEO of Axelar, a universal interoperability network securely connecting all blockchain ecosystems, applications, assets and users.
“As we move forward into 2022, there are more blockchain networks than ever before, and mass adoption has begun. This coming year, it’s critical that these chains are developed to communicate with one another so that assets such as tokens, NFTs and smart contract information can be transferred between chains. This represents a significant challenge for the year ahead. In 2021, we saw developers and blockchain firms approach this problem by attempting to build one-off bridges between two networks, or interoperability add-ons to connect various components of their ecosystem. This has proved to be inefficient and adds unnecessary security risks for the ecosystem, as these approaches often rely on a centralized party moving assets from one chain to another. Despite the existing challenges, we now see the demand and have a huge opportunity to accelerate the blockchain space by connecting these siloed blockchains. In the coming year, we’re going to witness the development of singular, universal infrastructures that help blockchain ecosystems achieve true interoperability, taking the industry a step closer to mainstream adoption.”
Roger Ver of Bitcoin.com
Roger is an early Bitcoin adopter and investor. He is the executive chairman of Bitcoin.com, a site featuring cryptocurrency news in addition to an exchange and wallet service. He is also one of the five original founders of the Bitcoin Foundation.
“Crypto’s mass adoption started the day Satoshi released Bitcoin to the world and was accelerated by the launch of the Silk Road.
The more people use crypto as cash, the more adoption it will have around the world.”
Paolo Ardoino of Bitfinex
Paolo is the chief technology of Bitfinex, a digital asset trading platform offering state-of-the-art services for digital currency traders and global liquidity providers.
“Crypto has undoubtedly entered the mass consciousness this year. Still, in terms of using Bitcoin for payments and services, we are far from achieving mass adoption. This will inevitably change as the growth that we’ve witnessed in the Lightning Network continues to accelerate.
The Lightning Network has capabilities beyond those of current operating systems within both the crypto space and traditional financial ecosystems. With the potential to oversee millions of transactions per second, an extraordinary advancement, it far exceeds payment providers such as Visa, which currently manages about 60,000 transactions per second.
The adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender in El Salvador has also been an important juncture on this journey as major corporations adopt the technology as a means of facilitating payments. If you look at where crypto was five years ago, there were few projects coming to fruition with tangible results. Now, in 2021, we’re seeing everyone from Twitter to small businesses looking to integrate cryptocurrency in some way. In three years, the majority of businesses that have the capacity to…
cointelegraph.com