Daily: Top 5 Crypto & Blockchain Trends to Look Forward To in 2019

Happy New Year to all Rock the Block Live fans! It's 2019 and here, we follow-up our 2018 look back trends with the top 5 Trends we predict will happen in 2019:

1) Institutional money will determine the fate of crypto:

• Just as how the end of 2017 saw moms-and-pops-and-retirees putting their life savings into crypto hoping to make it big (and then losing almost all of them in 2018), the prediction for 2019 is that the next injection of funds will come from how prepared and controlled institutional money from the likes of Bakkt, Fidelity, Van Eck's Bitcoin ETF (if it ever gets approved) and many others will play out when they do eventually get launched.
• Already, there's talk that the recent bear market trend is really a false impression that investor interest in crypto is waning, when it is actually the opposite, where Wall Street investors are actually stocking up on Bitcoin and altcoins at their current low prices.
• This may yet be another FOMO tactic for another bull trap but with crypto, it's always hard to say.

2) 90% of cryptocurrencies will die:

• The recent sell-off in crypto prices has caused many crypto projects to go bust, or put on hold indefinitely.
• Even in twittersphere, you can see influencers posting their videos much later or far in-between from their usual daily uploads.
• If you visit the DeadCoins site, you'll see that out of almost 2000 cryptocurrencies currently listed on CoinMarketcap, 1000 of them are already dead or found to be a scam.
• So we're 50% through on the prediction already.
• The few cryptocurrencies that will survive 2019 will be the ones that can solve the key challenges in blockchain usage and adoption: scalability, security and transactions per second (for blockchain protocol projects).
• We also expect to see some reckoning for USD Tether, especially with the telescope it's been placed under throughout 2018, and perhaps resolutions from the many different lawsuits and court cases brought on founders, scammers, companies who launched ICOs but were really scams with empty promises.

3) More enterprises and governments will push blockchain adoption, but in the private sector:

• While public blockchains and cryptocurrencies seem to be going through a tailspin at the moment, the private blockchain sector seems to be flourishing.
• In 2019, we expect to see big money being pumped into private blockchain initiatives, which will improve ideas like supply chain transparency and tracking, legal documentation and identity tracking being moved or at least trialed and deployed in small precincts to the blockchain, and remittances/money transfers among banks and financial institutions.
• We're already seeing trials of elections and driver licenses being put on the blockchain (in Japan and Australia respectively), so don't be surprised to see greater adoption on the back-end and within private agencies and governments in 2019.
• Big corporations like IBM, Ant Financial, SAP and many more are experimenting with blockchain in some way or another.
• With big budgets already parked aside to explore them, we believe these corporations will be under tremendous pressure to show results in 2019.
• For governments, we're already seeing Malta establishing itself as a blockchain country, but we'll see more countries, or states doing so in 2019, such as Estonia, Jeju Island, Singapore and many more.

4) Greater usage of decentralized exchanges versus centralized exchanges:

• While 2018 is the year we saw centralized exchanges like Binance and Coinbase gaining lots of publicity and profit, 2019 will see a marked shift in user trading to decentralized exchanges.
• These DEXes promise to deliver trustless, permissionless trading environments where users can remain anonymous and trade tokens they own direct through their wallets.
• The DEXes will also be investing in greater security (having learned from what happened to centralized exchanges in 2018) while upping their support levels and token listing structures for the benefit of improving liquidity.
• The increase in DEX awareness and usage will also be spurred by the heightened restrictions and laws governing the use of crypto exchanges in countries like US, China and India, as many investors will choose to trade without the need to upload their identifications and personal data.

5) Simplification and deeper integration of tools and apps to measure and predict portfolios and values:

• While 2018 saw an increase in the usage of candlesticks, Ichimoku clouds, Bart signals and so on in crypto chartology, 2019 will see a greater move towards simplifying crypto valuation and prediction models for the layman on one end, and a greater integrative effort by institutions into their Big Data models for stocks, futures, derivatives and commodity trading on the other.
• In other words, if you're using apps like BlockFolio, Delta, CoinStats or wallets like Trust, ImToken and so on, you may see developments to provide you with greater predictive tools so that you can forecast your gains and losses better with a few taps and pinches on your smartphone.
• While on the other extreme, if you're a day trader or heavy-duty derivatives investor who eat, sleep and breathe trading charts and volume tracking, there will be a greater movement to also integrate cryptocurrency models into existing tools so that you can plan and divest your investments across different asset classes, such as stocks, precious metals, property, commodities and cryptocurrency.