Andrew Keys: 16 Ethereum Predictions From a Crypto Oracle - CoinDesk

Every year since 2016, I’ve made predictions about what the next year will bring for the industry. If you pay attention to the incremental change that occurs year after year, you realize everything is connected and you can foresee some exciting outcomes. 2021 will undoubtedly be a year for blockchain and crypto to take center stage economically, politically and socially. Here’s what I see coming.

This post is part of CoinDesk’s 2020 Year in Review – a collection of op-eds, essays and interviews about the year in crypto and beyond. Andrew Keys is Managing Partner at Digital Asset Risk Management Advisors and the co-founder of LiquidStake, a solution to the liquidity problem of Ethereum 2.0. Formerly, Keys was the head of Global Business Development at ConsenSys.

1. In 2020, the world started to understand the intrinsic value of bitcoin as “digital gold.” In 2021, we will witness the same understanding of Ethereum as “digital oil.”

In the next year, Ethereum will solidify its place as the future substrate of the global digital economy by underwriting the world’s contracts.

Contracts are the connective tissue of the world – sales contracts, college acceptances, employment offers, insurance policies, medical prescriptions, NDAs, ISDA agreements, etc. Yes, Earth runs on contracts (not on Dunkin’). Ethereum allows contracts to go truly digital. The digitization of the contract is the digitization of the global economy, which has been valued at an estimated $270 trillion (compared to the $18 trillion market cap of gold that bitcoin stands to capture). Ethereum has the opportunity to upgrade entire economies, not just one asset class.

2. Ethereum 2.0 phase 1 will successfully occur.

On Dec. 1, the Ethereum community successfully launched phase 0 of Ethereum 2.0. The network upgrade from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake will make Ethereum scale and run faster with less computing power. In 2021, we will see phase 1 of Ethereum 2.0 go live, drastically improving scalability.

3. Bitcoin will reach $50K.

Bitcoin has a singular use case with a limited supply. As more institutional investors continue to buy bitcoin, the price will surge to $50,000.

The Eth 2.0 upgrade will catapult the network’s capability and garner even more attention from enterprises and institutional investors, driving the price of the ether currency to new heights.

5. Total DeFi locked will exceed $150 billion and 2021 will be the year of DeFi cross-chain bridges.

It is undeniable that Ethereum is home to the majority of decentralized finance activity. But other networks will enter the space in a more material way, putting other native tokens to work in Ethereum’s DeFi ecosystem. With the various tokenized bitcoin options (tBTC, ren, wBTC) growing in popularity, we will see bitcoin’s $430 billion market cap collateralized in DeFi. This will grow the TVL in DeFi exponentially.

See also: Why DeFi Pulse’s Key Metric Is So Simple It’s Confusing

6. As Web…