The price of Bitcoin may be creeping up to the heights last seen in December of 2017, however, the belief of Bitpay’s chief commercial officer, Sonny Singh, is that the value of the major cryptocurrency will really start to soar when big businesses gets fully involved.
Unlike the speculative rally that was seen in 2017, this latest rebound from a bearish market has a much stronger institutionalized base with adoption from regulators, companies and governments in much more abundance.
Singh is of the opinion that business interest and endorsement of cryptocurrency is what is fuelling the current market-wide bull run.
Real use cases
Bitcoin’s last rally was certainly based on FOMO, speculation, and a lack of understanding. However, in the market retraction, there was time for the base technology, blockchain, as well as cryptocurrencies, to fit into the current system and show off actual use cases.
“You’re starting to see that these currencies have real use cases around the world, and it’s making people really excited now because they can see the light at the end of the tunnel for these use cases,” Singh told Bloomberg.
Some of the most reported on use cases and adoption of cryptocurrencies from major institutions include Facebook with its journey into a premissioned cryptocurrency, as well as Fidelity Investments and their foray into the space.
Moreover moves such as JPMorgan’s JPM Coin and telecoms provider AT&T now accepting Bitcoin for payments by using BitPay.
Profiting from mainstream exposure
With Bitcoin being the pioneer of a wide blockchain and cryptocurrency ecosystem, it is hard to separate the major decentralised coin from institutionalized growth, as much as the likes of Facebook and JP Morgan would like to.
“How’s the regulator going to show that JPMorgan we like, but bitcoin and Ethereum we don’t like?” Singh said.
“It’s going to be hard. They’re going to have to make a classification: ‘digital currencies — these are the rules around all digital currencies.’ And that’s what the industry’s waiting for — to have regulations that we can follow and adhere to to prove that everything is legal in an organized way.”
The year of enterprise use
While it is hard to separate Bitcoin from the entire blockchain and cryptocurrency space, more have tried to exclude blockchain from the cryptocurrency side of things – with varying levels of success.
China is one place that has gone full blockchain but has denied anything to Bitcoin and other decentralised cryptocurrencies, however, there is still evidence of things like Bitcoin benefiting from blockchain advancements.
There are a lot more major companies valued at billions which have started delving into the potential of blockchain and while this sector has had a chance to grow organically and impressively aside from cryptocurrencies, it would still appear that there is enough of a link between them to benefit each other.
