Despite a tumultuous year filled with tumbles and tumbles in the price of cryptocurrencies, Stephen Goulden, a senior analyst at cryptocurrency trading firm Cumberland, pointed to several “green shoots” that will emerge on the surface of cryptocurrencies in 2023.
In a 14-page “Year Review” report released Dec. 24, Gulden said he sees four “evolving stories” in 2023 that will lead to “significant progress” for cryptocurrency in the next six to two months.
These include non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which have become the "go-to way" to tokenize a brand's intellectual property (IP), Web3 apps, which are "really popular," and bitcoin (BTC) and ether ( ETH), which can be used further. often. . as a reserve of wealth for the nation.
While NFTs have thus far been "predominantly confined to the art space," Gulden believes the next step for NFTs will be to combine NFTs and brand IP.
The analyst noted that many non-Web3 companies are already making "significant strides" in monetizing IP and increasing customer engagement with NFTs.
These include Starbucks' partnership with Polygon to create NFTs for Starbucks customers and the introduction of the Nike Swoosh, which allows users to create their own NFT sneakers.
“When you hear these companies talk about their Web3 initiatives, it's clear that they see digital interaction with customers and fans as a new facet of retail,” Gulden said.
He also noted that "selling NFTs to retail users can generate significant revenue with high profits." Nike is a classic example, making $200 million from digital sneakers alone. The analyst expects Polygon (MATIC), LooksRare (LOOK) and 0xmon (XMON) to lead this front.
The Cumberland-based analyst said that NFTs will be “a way to use IP tokenization,” sharing that there are around 80 trillion intangible assets on corporate balance sheets today.
Real utilities to gain momentum
Goulden also believes that adoption of Web3 platforms will bring "real benefits" in 2023, acknowledging that it has been "very difficult" to break Web2 monopolies to date:
“The reality is that projects like this take time to build and launch, so we estimate that hardware implementation will take more than 12 months and serious user adoption will take 2-5 years.”
Some "really useful" platforms, according to Goulden, include IT recruiting platform Braintrust, the Helium IoT protocol, the GPU rendering service Render, the global mapping project Hivemapper, and the teleport sharing app. .
Web3 games to attract "serious" players.
The analyst was also optimistic about the Web3 gaming market, noting that there are around three billion gamers in the world, 200 million of whom are "serious," representing a total target market of $200- 300 billion. .
"[...] However, these users typically do not own in-game assets and have little to no control or management of these gaming ecosystems," Gulden said.
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Gulden says that the winning aspects of blockchain-based games will bring significant benefits to developers, but added that “triple A (blockbuster quality) probably won because it takes 2-3 years to create a better game.” . we "Become a Web3 Game Star" by 2023 or 2024.
BTC and ETH as reserve assets
Finally, the analyst suggested that special attention should be paid to the potential role of BTC and ETH as reserve assets, especially for export-oriented countries.
Gulden said that many of the world's exporting countries may decide to pool their reserves with alternative assets like cryptocurrencies instead of US Treasuries to devalue their currencies against the US dollar:
“Even a small allocation of BTC or ETH by the central bank would be significant and would likely cause other exporting countries to follow suit.”