Venture capital investor Tim Draper has predicted that total cryptocurrency market capitalization will hit $80 trillion in the next 15 years, news outlet DealStreetAsia reported September 14.
Speaking at the DealStreetAsia PE-VC Summit 2018 in Singapore, Draper argued that the significant slide in the cryptocurrency market in recent months is attributed to people who have not adopted digital currencies as a new asset class. Draper stated that once people become more familiar with the technology, it would transform many important industries globally:
“I think it’s going to have such a transformative effect on industries that we never even imagined would be transformable. The internet went after industries that were $10–100 billion dollar markets, cryptocurrency will go after trillion dollar markets — these are finance, healthcare and insurance, banking and investment banking, and governments.”
In January 2018, Barron’s reported that the Russell 3000 Index — which accounts for 98.5 percent of the entire U.S. stock market — was worth $30 trillion. The “staggering” amount of money followed a successful year in 2017, in which the market experienced 22 percent returns.
Draper also compared the current state of the crypto market with the early days of Internet, saying:
“The internet started in the same way, it came in big waves and then it kind of came crashing down, and then the next wave comes concentrated but much bigger, and I suspect the same thing will go on here (with Bitcoin).”
Brian Kelly of CNBC’s Fast Money compared cryptocurrency to the “Internet in the 1980s” as well, pointing out that Bitcoin (BTC) is still in its early stages. Kelly asserted that while he used to see crypto as comparable to the Internet in 1995, he now understands that a better comparison is further back. He added:
“I think this technology is going to work, it’s going to be game changing, but it’s very early days, so we can have this massive volatility.”
At press time, total crypto market capitalization is around $202 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.
