The Future of Blockchain Technology: Top Five Predictions for 2030 | Blockchain Expo

In 2017 cryptocurrencies took the world by a storm. The price of Bitcoin shot up to nearly $20,000. The average ICO returned well over 10x. ICO funding surpassed traditional VC funding. Blockchain technology emerged as the new buzzword of choice by executives. Is this all just hype?

We argue this is just the beginning. In fact, both Ray and I left our jobs at the well-known technology research firm, Gartner, to join the blockchain movement. Here is how we think blockchain technology will shape the world by 2030.

Prediction # 1: Government Crypto

By 2030, most governments around the world will create or adopt some form of virtual currency.

The government currency of the future is inevitably crypto. Compared to the traditional fiat alternative, cryptocurrency is more efficient, provides reduced settlement times, and offers increased traceability. Cryptocurrency can also be backed by real assets, similar to fiat currency, and its price can be artificially manipulated by numerous controls (e.g., monetary policy for “printing” more tokens).

In the short term, government-based cryptocurrency will become an area of experimentation and explorations, led mostly by developing nations with unstable economies and weak institutions. Many of such efforts will move in a hasty fashion — with a timeline driven by political concerns rather than economic issues or technical progress. Consider the Zimbabwe dollar, for instance, which has suffered a staggering inflation of 500,000,000,000%. Many Zimbabweans have already turned to Bitcoin as a hedge against their national currency, thereby driving the Bitcoin price up on the local crypto-market. Creating a new cryptocurrency presents a viable solution for the Zimbabwean government to alleviate the bleak perception of its country’s monetary challenges. In the short term, such efforts might prove very successful. Considering Venezuela’s newly minted cryptocurrency “petro” raised over $5 billion during the pre-sale event, many other countries will follow suit. However, many of these early projects will inevitably fail due to the early stage of the technology which is yet to mature and due to lack of in-house knowledge by a respective government in charge.

In a lot of these cases, such experiments will be unintentional. In other words, governments moving forward with a cryptocurrency project may not realize that they are test subjects in their own experiments. Due to the lack of requisite expertise internally, these governments will turn to external consultancies, some of which are newly formed and with limited resources. As a result, many governments will end up victimized by hackers, due to inadequate or incompletely implemented practices regarding private-key management and related processes. This situation parallels the early days of the Web, where major companies that were successful in commerce (but not familiar with e-commerce) made mistakes in initial implementations, resulting in loss of data and funds.

In the long run, however, successful cases will emerge. Next generation blockchain technology will resolve many current limitations, such as scalability, privacy controls, toolset maturity, and interoperability. Price-stable tokens regulated by monetary policies and backed by collateral will start to gain traction as they become more reliable as a means of exchange and as a store of value. Governments that have failed to create a successful cryptocurrency will turn to “stable coins” as their virtual currency of choice.

Sample companies trying to solve this problem today: Tether, BitShares, Maker, Basecoin, Carbon, Stably, Havven, Kowala, TrueUSD, Arccy, Sweetbridge, Augmint, Fragments, Petro, and others.