Forecast for 2023: 10 major trends in crypto that you will love hearing about

The closer the New Year, the more we want to look into the year 2023. We collected new crypto predictions from experts at Forbes, Coindesk, and CryptoInsight and decided to publish a mix of the most realistic and interesting ones. This is our top 10 of what will happen to crypto in the new 2023.

1. Epic battles over regulation

Although this event was long expected, the collapse of FTX dramatically accelerated the beginning of regulation in the crypto industry. Most likely, 2023 will be the year of the beginning of these big changes. 

“There’s going to be harsh crypto regulation proposed and an epic battle by the community to fight the parts of it that threaten decentralization.” 

Laura Shin, host of the “Unchained” podcast.

2. Truly global Bitcoin adoption

Alex Gladstein (Chief Strategy Officer of the Human Rights Foundation) said this in an interview right after he returned from the big Bitcoin conference in Ghana: 

“I was blown away, I was staggered by the number of bitcoin entrepreneurs and leaders from so many different countries. They’re all just building on bitcoin. It’s legitimately amazing,” he says, which is why he believes that “global adoption is probably the number one story for next year.”

3. Don’t count out NFTs

“The sustained high-risk appetite in NFT funding in 2022 is a strong indicator that it will be one of the first sectors to recover next year. Throughout the past year, we were already beginning to see major NFT investments from major Web2 brands [Starbucks and Disney] and across Web3. … This shows no sign of stopping in 2023. Brands will continue to flock to NFTs.”

Jamie Burke, CEO and Founder of Outlier Ventures.

4. The big exchanges become “disaggregated”

“Exchange stack gets disaggregated — we see custody, brokerage and exchange/price discovery get broken out into different players, just like in [traditional finance]. This makes it impossible for another FTX to happen.

When trust is low, incumbents consolidate. Coinbase, Binance, Uniswap will likely gain market share in aggregate, as people are less likely to trust smaller and weaker players. Network effects get stronger.”

Haseeb Qureshi — Managing Partner, Dragonfly Capital.

5. Stablecoins replace ‘dollarization’

“In the old days, countries whose currencies collapsed would dollarize — they’d import dollar bills and start using that as money. Ten years from now, that will be a relic. Countries will dollarize using permissionless stablecoins, and central banks around the world will ultimately fear crypto-dollarization as a check against runaway inflation.”

Haseeb Qureshi — Managing Partner, Dragonfly Capital.

6. Everything becomes tokenized

“The “tokenization of everything” is rapidly changing how we perceive money and wealth, spurring the creation of digital micro-economies. NFTs are the first killer app. The battle for the future of money is on, and my money is on Web 3.0 innovations, creating opportunities for many, not just a few.”

Sandra Ro, CEO, Global Blockchain Business Council.

7. Companies ape into tokens

“I believe every company in the world will have a token in its capital structure in the next five to 10 years. These tokens will be hybrid securities — part loyalty/member rewards program and part quasi-equity, in that the token will have a utility within a company’s ecosystem (rewards) and will also have financial value as the company grows revenues (pass-through dividends).

All consumer-facing businesses will benefit from engaging their customers with a token — from Starbucks, Delta Airlines, Netflix, and Disney to small local companies like your barber, gym and corner bodega.”

Jeff Dorman, Chief Investment Officer at Arca.

8. The world adopts the ‘DeFi matrix’

“The DeFi matrix may be to the 2020s what the social graph was to the 2010s. Once every asset can be represented in a digital wallet — Bitcoin and Ethereum, yes, but also CBDCs [central bank digital currencies], stocks, loans, bonds, etc. — all these billions of assets will trade against each other every second of every day around the world.

This table of pairwise trades is what I call the DeFi matrix. Some of the cells in the DeFi matrix, like BTC/USD, have tremendous liquidity across many order books. Others, like a recent NFT [non-fungible token] vs. a new token, may only have what an AMM [Automated Market Maker] can give them. But all financial markets can be reduced to sub-matrices of the DeFi matrix. The traditional stock market will be CBDCs vs crypto equities. The forex market will be CBDCs vs CBDCs. And the fiat/crypto markets will be BTC/USDC and the like.”

Balaji Srinivasan — Investor, Former Chief Technology Officer of Coinbase 

9. The DeFi matrix spurs competition and becomes a check on central banks

“The DeFi matrix will be a check on the power of central bank digital currencies. Just as Google News made every local newspaper compete against every local newspaper, digital wallets will make every national digital currency compete against every other national digital currency — and every other asset, public and private.

Nations will only be able to mandate adoption within their borders, and even then people may only retain the minimum balance of a surveillance currency. They’ll use digital wallets to select assets with programmability, privacy, possibility of upside and predictable monetary policy over locked-down assets that promise none of these features. As such, we are entering an age of global monetary competition.”

Balaji Srinivasan, Visionary.

10. Money gets weirder

“My prediction for the future of money is that it’s going to get a lot weirder. It will be more closely tied to, or allow a greater expression of, our identities and our individuality. It will reflect our relationships in both the physical and digital worlds.

It’s going to accelerate globalization in bringing together people with similar values across borders — and tying them together with financial incentives and an identity that is intensified and deepened with financial value involved. And all that is going to shake up the traditional world of governments, different legal jurisdictions and different local currencies.”

Laura Shin, Host of “The Unchained” podcast.