Bloomberg financial markets expert shares thoughts on what 2022 holds for crypto, Cardano and Ethereum in particular
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”.
Crypto is favored by institutions compared to a few years ago
Compared to just a few years ago, when institutions and financial experts used to say that Bitcoin and other cryptos ‘are going to zero’ and that they are ‘worthless’, the situation has a lot. changed for the better now. In 2021, the crypto industry saw several ETFs arrive, including the first US-based, SEC-approved Bitcoin. Also, according to the expert, there have been several IPOs in the crypto space, with the 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, pointed out Eddie van der Walt, 2021 has been a real breakthrough for crypto and has prepared 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 top blockchains like Cardano and Ethereum, saying they “have taken the NFT space and moved forward a bit in the narrative in terms of what we’re going to 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 regulations are a major risk factor for cryptocurrencies”
Since regulators are only waking up to decide how to run the crypto space, in the United States in particular, Walt called regulation a significant risk factor for crypto because it had never been regulated before. Therefore, there is currently a kind of regulatory arbitrage between crypto and ordinary assets. And that, according to the Bloomberg expert, could be negative for 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.
