I'm very bullish on the outlook for 2021. Optimism is not consensus, but how bullish I might be: the next bull cycle will be a "big bull" and I think we'll hit $100,000/BTC at the top of this cycle, at least by the end of 2021, crypto Cumulative network value of $3 trillion.
It's hard to ignore the five-year-old technology, which already handles more than $1 trillion in real value transfers per year, a figure that already exceeds that of PayPal. The vitality of Ethereum is undeniable, and it will continue to be a platform to watch in 2021
The size and usage of stablecoins has absolutely exploded this year. Tether is second only to ETH itself in terms of economic value stored on the Ethereum blockchain.
Almost every type of NFT built to date could finally gain traction , and the Web3 platform opens the door to a native digital future.
Bitcoin, a non-seizureable form of private money, has proven hard to kill. It has outperformed all major asset classes at every relevant time period in its history and has the perfect macro tailwind and momentum.
Litecoin, which is essentially a production testnet for Bitcoin. LTC can at least serve as a reward pool for hackers to stress test BTC upgrades. If you can, hack the Litecoin network and steal funds there. LTC is still ironically called "digital silver" somehow,
This year, Ethereum is on track to process more than $1 trillion worth of transactions, including the vast majority of volume in the nascent (and increasingly complex) DeFi and "crypto-dollar" space. It has been so successful that eth1 is now at maximum capacity and must scale orders of magnitude rapidly to maintain its market share relative to newcomers and keep its vibrant ecosystem cost-competitive.
Rollups are essentially standalone blockchains that process transactions independently of the Ethereum blockchain, but record a snapshot of their state onto the main chain. They are similar in structure to Bitcoin's sidechains. The success and prioritization of rollups will lead to a pragmatic shift in the Ethereum roadmap, as eth1.5+rollups will equate to a >10,000x improvement in network processing power, while eliminating potential pitfalls of trying to split contract execution between shards headache problem. eth1.5+rollups will allow everyone to settle high-value and bundled transactions directly to the eth1 beacon chain, while dividing data storage to other eth2 shards.
Vitalik remains a core competitive advantage for Ethereum because I believe people want to follow him and believe in him, and because he built something that made a lot of people dirty and rich.