Despite the recent pull back from over half a trillion $ to around $450 billion, the market cap for all cryptos will be higher than at the end of 2017 and could likely exceed $1 trillion by the end of 2018. Historically market valuations have grown over 100% per year, although with large fluctuations. Bitcoin and the current top 10 cryptos will mostly be more valuable than today.
Image: The Proposed Fiat $1 Trillion Platinum Coin from 2005 era
Ethereum will surpass Bitcoin in market cap (65% probability). This will occur as financial services providers and other enterprises roll out solutions during the year. The Ethereum Enterprise Alliance now has over 200 members including major technology companies such as Cisco, HP Enterprise Intel, and Microsoft and a number of major banks and financial services companies. It has over a dozen working groups. It is inevitable that major solutions will come out of these organization.
The Hyperledger Consortium, created by the Linux Foundation has eight project areas. Their premier membership includes the top three Japanese computer companies, and Cisco, Intel, and IBM are also premier members. There are 185 total members. The Hyperledger Consortium is addressing solutions across finance, healthcare, manufacturing, logistics and other industries.
Hyperledger Sawtooth 1.0 released late January, is a modular platform for building and running distributed ledgers. It integrates with Ethereum and supports a number of common scripting languages for developing smart contracts.
We believe that platform developments and industry cooperation in the Ethereum ecosystem will drive increasing interest in, and value for, the Ethereum coin.
The overall cryptocurrency ecosystem will continue to garner more interest, and increasing regulation from SEC and other national authorities will actually open the taps for greater Wall Street investment.