Just as Netscape’s IPO marked the real kick-off for the internet era, 2017 will be the starting gun for broad involvement of venture, hedge funds, and eventually average consumers in cryptocurrencies and related protocols and assets.
The recent run up in cryptocurrency valuations has caused a sudden and profound renewal of interest by entrepreneurs and investors in crypto. In December 2013 there was a similar spike of interest in Bitcoin. At the time, there was a 10-times run up and Bitcoin hit over $1,000 and then crashed to about $200. While the excitement in 2013 was largely transitory, this time feels different.
If Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto had been a more traditional public person, crypto would have been embraced by the investment community more quickly. Without a public figurehead to run on the cover of Fortune, crypto took longer to catch on with investors than it might have.
So what has changed? There are multiple reasons why now is crypto’s Netscape moment:
Cryptocurrency as a gold replacement
When Bitcoin first launched, it was shrugged off as a toy. When each Bitcoin was worth 25 cents, people would send them to each other as a novelty.
Recently, Bitcoin has emerged as a legitimate gold alternative and a hedge against the volatile times with which gold is often associated. I have heard from multiple hedge funds that they have not seen the price movements in gold they have expected in flight-to-safety situations in the past six months. Instead, Bitcoin has moved in step with what they previously expected gold to do. Bitcoin is slowly assuming the digital version of the role that gold, and gold company stocks, used to play for hedging strategies. But one big impediment to Bitcoin adoption as a large scale gold alternative is its own inherent volatility.
There are increasing numbers of anecdotal stories of families repatriating money, or people travelling across borders, with Bitcoin. It is the only asset you can store in your brain and traverse borders.
Just as there are other precious metal value stores beyond gold, there are other cryptocurrencies emerging as the potential silver and platinum of the market. Current contenders include LiteCoin, Zcash, and Monero. Litecoin differs from Bitcoin in that it is memory-hard proof-of-work as opposed to Bitcoin’s CPU-hard proof-of-work approach. Zcash and Monero have extra aspects of anonymity that differ from Bitcoin.
New technologies grow the crypto market
A few years ago Bitcoin was the only game in town. While great as an asset store, Bitcoin had a number of limitations that made it harder for developers to work with as well as limited its applications. For example, it has a difficult scripting language which is not “Turing complete”, an element of compatability. Bitcoin was purposefully designed with limitations that allowed it to function effectively as a value store.
Ethereum overcame a number of these limitations by providing a JavaScript-like scripting language which is Turing complete, as well as positioning itself as a distributed general-purpose computer, versus a distributed currency. Ethereum allows a number of more complex applications to be built on top of it. One of the primary applications of Ethereum’s smart contracts is its ability to power a lot of other tokens and initial coin offerings (ICOs).
At this point, the argument is being made in the crypto community that any highly distributable, compute or micro-payment-based commodity should be able to be turned into a tokenised protocol. This would include things like compute (Ethereum), storage (Filecoin – a cryptocurrency with proof-of-reproducibility and proof-of-spacetime versus Bitcoin’s proof of work) but also items like power grids, wifi and the like.
This wealth of new crypto protocols, applications and tokens, as well as newer cryptocurrencies like Litecoin, Monero, and Zcash, has driven recent developer and investor interest. In the internet analogy, Mosaic and then Netscape allowed easier access to the internet, enabling a new class of startups – Google, Amazon, PayPal – but also a new set of developers to engage and build applications millions of people could access. Similarly, Bitcoin’s white paper and codebase has led to a whole new set of crypto projects with their own use cases and applications. While many of these have yet to be proven, there is a lot of room for this technology to be applied.
Ethereum smart contracts enabled new crypto projects to crowdfund tens of millions of dollars to fuel their development and growth. These token sales are often implemented as smart contracts running on Ethereum. The ability to raise tens of millions of dollars in non-dilutive capital via an ICO means that some crypto efforts can avoid dilutive venture capital, crypto efforts may be monetised quickly, and we are likely to see a fair amount of speculative investing and potentially abuse of these instruments.
The ability to raise non-dilutive capital, and in some cases cash out early, will drive a gold rush mentality as well as a fair amount of financial speculation. Coinlist is an interesting new tool in this area.
Fewer alternative entrepreneurial markets
Every technology cycle includes a period of mass focus on a handful of key areas – social, mobile, machine learning and so on. Some of these movements result in massively outsized companies – Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Uber and so on – and others fizzle out – location services, nanotech, energy 2.0. As we end one investment or entrepreneurial cycle, there is often a gap in clear areas to work until the technology world hits on the next interesting area. Right now there is a major lull in mainstream software innovation.
Given a dearth of alternative interesting large-scale markets and technologies to work in, entrepreneurial activity has accelerated in this market.
Cryptocurrency stands out as an area of interest in part due to all the people who suddenly made a lot of money in the price run-up of the past six months. As people make tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, entrepreneurs, investors and press take notice. A lot of people are going into crypto out of ambition, greed or simply because it seems increasingly derisked due to ICOs and price rises.
Capital inflows
We still live in a low-interest-rate world, with few good places for investors to deploy capital. While most institutional and consumer capital has been sitting on the sidelines for cyptocurrencies, it is now easier then it has ever been to buy and store these assets thanks to companies like Coinbase, Gdax and Kraken. Increased ease of trading in turn has driven recent adoption on a global basis.
To date, institutional investors and hedge funds have largely stayed on the sidelines. In part this is due to a lack of tools for institutions to invest and hold crypto. It is also driven by the conservative nature of most of these investors, with Abigail Johnson from Fidelity as a notable counter. Once large institutional investors inevitably move off of the sidelines and into crypto, there will be a large run-up in valuation of currencies, and given the lack of savyness, probably a bunch of crap tokens will also get temporarily expensive too, just like the last internet bubble.
With the recent run-up, over a dozen crypto hedge funds have been founded since Metastable. This incremental capital coming into the industry should make the recovery from the recent crypto crash occur much faster then in 2013. However, if the past is any guide to the future, it is highly likely there will be at least one or more major corrections – for example, a 10% to 90% drop – in crypto prices on the way up. It is going to be a volatile and bumpy ride.
Summary
Cryptocurrencies are having their Netscape moment. Unlike December 2013, this time there is sustainable entrepreneurial and investor interest. Bitcoin has started to prove itself as a gold alternative. New protocols and blockchains are driving a burst of innovation as well as easing fundraising via ICOs. A lack of non-crypto entrepreneurial opportunities is also driving people in. While there is a long way to go to prove many non-currency applications, this technology and its implications are here to stay.
This is an edited version of an article first published on Elad’s blog – http://blog.eladgil.com/2017/07/cryptocurrencys-netscape-moment.html