By
Tolu Ajiboye
February 19th, 2024
Citing the growth of institutional level projects in the crypto industry, Krug remains positive about the adoption of crypto in the near future.
After the last year’s unprecedented bull run in the crypto market, this year turns out to be disappointing so far. Several times, the market has turned down every expectation of recovery from the crypto investors. However, there are a few analysts who continue to remain bullish on the long-term story of the crypto market.
During a recent interview with Bloomberg TV, Joey Krug, co-chief investment officer at Pantera Capital made a solid bullish bet. Krug said that the next Bitcoin bull run would trigger a 10x jump in the overall cryptocurrency market. Thus, according to Krug’s prediction, we can see crypto market touching $2 trillion market cap.
“If you look at that next bull run, I think the crypto space overall could hit 10x from here.”
Krug remains bullish on big institutions like Fidelity Investments and Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) venturing the crypto market. Krug noted that the market is eagerly waiting for some concrete adoption to trigger the next bull run. Recently, financial services giant Fidelity Investments announced the launch of its crypto trading platform Fidelity Digital Assets. However, Fidelity’s crypto trading platform will provide services only to enterprise clients. Fidelity will also launch its custodial solution to safely store the digital assets.
Similarly, in August, ICE announced the launch of Bakkt platform to promote to spending crypto assets in daily life. ICE has collaborated with big giants from retail and tech space, like Starbucks and Microsoft to push forward its project.
Scalability Is the Key Factor to Trigger the Bull Run
Krug said that for the next bull run to occur, cryptocurrency market has to first overcome the scalability issues. He said that the current state of blockchain and cryptocurrency is similar to the internet before dial-up.
“If you look at the internet, it’s easy to say, ‘Well, you just create an app, get some users, and then you solve the scalability problems.’ But these are all markets, and so if you don’t have scalability, you don’t have market makers, and so you don’t have liquidity.”
Currently, there are two important projects under development, Lightning and Liquid Networks, to solve Bitcoin’s scalability woes. Both of them are the second-layer “off-chain” scalability solutions for Bitcoin blockchain. However, they differ in the purpose of their application.
Lightning network specifically targets fast settlements of micro-payments at reduced costs. On the other hand, the Liquid network specifically targets big financial institutions and exchanges, when required to deal with high volumes and large transactions. Last week itself, blockchain startup Blockstream announced the first Liquid Network for Bitcoin going live.
Krug is positive about the scalability of blockchain networks and expects them to reach the scale of Visa and Mastercard in a couple of years.