The report stated that the large increase in Ethereum’s price influenced the transaction values in H1 2017 to surpass USD 325 billion. Cryptocurrency is now typically seeing daily trades well in excess of USD 2 billion. Meanwhile, the research found that Litecoin experienced a surge in volume and value; if current levels are maintained it should exceed USD 100 billion in transactions in 2017.
Furthermore, despite Bitcoin’s hard fork on 1st August, the cryptocurrency has continued its rise in value. Indeed, since the start of 2017, Bitcoin prices have risen from around USD 1,000 to more than USD 4,000. However, the research cautioned that a second planned fork in November 2017, when the SegWit2x scaling solution is due to be implemented, may prompt a split in the community, potentially leading to depreciation.
The new research, The Future of Blockchain: Key Vertical Opportunities & Deployment Strategies 2017-2022, also focused on new use cases for blockchain, claimed that ultimately the brightest prospects in the sector came from deployments of private blockchain technologies for permissioned ledgers, rather than the public chains running cryptocurrencies.
Every day we send out a free e-mail with the most important headlines of the last 24 hours.
Subscribe now