In 2020, the scale of global corporate blockchain spending will reach 4 billion U.S. dollars, nearly doubling compared to 19 years. Compared with the total expenditure of enterprises in the IT field, the penetration rate of the blockchain industry has increased to 1%. The huge market demand in the future will bring rare development opportunities and broad development space for blockchain technology.
In 2020, the top three popular application areas of blockchain are "blockchain + finance", "blockchain + payment", and "blockchain + data service". In 2021, there are more important areas of blockchain worthy of attention, including encrypted trust, encrypted banking, encrypted artwork, STO, blockchain industry trends, blockchain supervision, central bank digital currency, DeFi+NFT, Assets on the chain, digital identity, public chain and distributed storage, etc.
1. Encrypted asset trust
A large number of mainstream Wall Street institutions are aggressively entering the crypto asset market. At present, more than 16 listed companies have begun to announce their holdings of BTC, and more and more banks in countries and regions such as South Korea, Singapore, the United Kingdom and Hong Kong have gradually deployed crypto assets. Asset custody field. The growth rate of the investment return of Grayscale's institutions. At the beginning of 2020, the entire company's asset management scale was only US$2 billion. In just one year, its entire assets have exceeded US$27.7 billion.
2. Crypto Asset Bank
The original and supporting financial infrastructure of encrypted assets is also taking shape. DeFi has locked up more than 30 billion U.S. dollars of encrypted assets on the chain by virtue of seven sectors including DEX and lending. In January 2021, an encrypted asset custody company obtained a federal bank license from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of Currency, and the first federal-level crypto bank in the United States was born.
The intervention of payment giants such as Paypal and Visa has made the payment of encrypted assets increasingly convenient. There are more than 30 banks in the world that provide services to crypto asset companies, and more than 10 banks have disclosed that they are directly involved in custody, transactions and other businesses. In addition, the development of encrypted asset debit cards is rapid, and more than 20 teams and institutions have begun to deploy encrypted asset debit cards.
3. Encrypted collectibles
Encrypted collectibles, whether it is NFT or encrypted artwork, are already attracting attention. Tickets, game props, artwork, etc. have begun to be widely distributed on NFT, and the size of this market is also growing rapidly. At the same time, there are more and more cases of this kind of issuance, including the people-friendly portraits currently auctioned by Christie's and the European Cup tickets issued by NFT, which are very interesting and worthy of attention.
4. Open decentralized finance (DeFi)
DeFi on Ethereum is based on smart contract functions and ERC-20 token standards to build various financial tool technologies. These technologies are extremely functional and can be programmed to implement a "Lego-style" combination of tools to build a brand new Rich applications. Although DeFi still has imperfect functions such as code vulnerabilities, security audits of underlying assets, and network stability, it does not affect the larger scale of application innovation. DeFi's innovation in blockchain finance has just begun, and its far-reaching significance is no less than that of Ethereum. The emergence of infrastructure such as workshops.
5. The formation of the blockchain industry trend
In 2021, the blockchain industry has formed four major trends while developing steadily: in conjunction with the development of "new infrastructure", the blockchain will integrate other new technologies and start to work; government affairs, supply chain, finance, big data and other sectors have become popular competitions Road landing is accelerating; the budding development of asset on-chain, digital securities may be the leader of global asset on-chain. All-in-one machines, underlying network facilities, blockchain chips and other supporting facilities continue to emerge, and public chains and alliance chains are developing rapidly.
6. Blockchain supervision
Global blockchain supervision has also made good progress. Countries around the world have introduced 238 policies in the blockchain field. Industrial development, CBDC, and financial supervision have become the most important areas of concern, accounting for 33%, 20%, and 17%, respectively.
From the perspective of policy categories, there are already special regulations and regions that provide guidance and interpretation around regulatory recommendations and precedents, and tend to update existing regulations or formulate new regulations. From the perspective of supervision, there are the largest number of policies related to behaviors such as digital asset operations, issuance, and transactions. Supervision policies that integrate with traditional policies mainly focus on anti-money laundering and taxation.
7. Central bank digital currencies
The digital currencies of central banks around the world are advancing rapidly. At present, about 80% of central banks in the world are conducting research, experimentation and development of CBDC, and 10% of countries have launched pilot projects. Among them, the central bank of China's digital currency DCEP has carried out three rounds of regional internal testing with a total of 40 million yuan in Shenzhen and Suzhou; major economies and countries in the world, such as the United States, the European Union, and Japan, have also turned from wait-and-see to active research. International organizations such as BIS, IMF, and G7 Group are also rapidly launching CBDC joint research to promote the establishment of international cooperation and standards.
8. Assets on the chain
At this point, we should pay attention to oracles and synthetic assets. The oracle is the key to the operation of DeFi, providing the information required for the execution of the smart contract and transforming off-chain data into an accessible format. If the smart contract needs to know the value of the asset, these data will be provided by the oracle. Synthetic assets are relatively complicated, but it can be noticed that the assets of such underlying technology providers have been rising recently for service providers related to synthetic assets.
9. Digital identity and data privacy
The position of data in the entire industry is becoming more and more important. With the widespread use of health codes, we have entered the era of digital identity. But this era of digital identity is not an era where privacy can be really well protected, and we really need to make privacy better protected. Based on blockchain and privacy computing, it will be an important solution for privacy protection in the future digital identity era.
10. New infrastructure
Many companies will join in the formulation of new infrastructure (public chain, alliance chain, cross-chain, multi-chain) standards, the overall technical consensus will arrive earlier than expected, and the scene will also have a leap-forward development. Now under the premise of ensuring security, the performance of the public chain will still have greater progress. From the perspective of the component trend of the blockchain system, this number may increase by one to two orders of magnitude.
11. Distributed storage
As the amount of data generated has doubled year by year, the need for cheap, accessible, and unlicensed storage will also increase. Distributed storage will become the global focus in 2021. This is because the blockchain is not suitable for storing large amounts of data due to storage redundancy, but DAG distributed storage can provide a storage method for the blockchain that can be stored for a long time, is low in cost, has good security, and has strong privacy protection.
Regarding the top ten prospects for 2021, the industry generally believes that
(1) traditional institutions will increase investment, and the allocation of encrypted assets will become a trend;
(2) the new track of crypto banks will become hot and become a bridgehead for competition;
(3) DeFi Fund precipitation is expected to exceed 100 billion US dollars, but future competition between DeFi is better than cooperation;
(4) Internet giants will be promoted, and commercial applications on the million-level user chain will be born.
(5) Public chain + alliance chain bottom platforms will flourish and compete It began to intensify, the scale of time-consuming cross-chain assets doubled, and cross-chain ease of use improved;
(6) Encrypted assets and asset supervision were improved, and more countries were enacting legislation;
(7) Global CBDC research and testing continued to heat up, but most major countries did not temporarily Will choose to fully implement;
(8) Assets on the chain, industry on the chain, data on the chain, technology integration and other applications, will create a lot of new space.
At present, more and more countries around the world are aware of the value of blockchain in the era of digital economy, and their support for blockchain technology is increasing. The blockchain is developing rapidly and gradually penetrates into all fields of the real economy, becoming a boost An important means for the development of the digital economy. In 2021, innovative applications and policy support will continue to be an important driving force for the development of blockchain. The coordinated development of blockchain and new technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things will bring industry development into the fast lane.