What will happen to cryptocurrency in the 2020s?

In the most recent article as part of the Nakamoto project, Coinbase Co-Founder and CEO Brian Armstrong offers his thoughts on what the crypto industry will look like over the next decade. The list is wide-ranging, but his most notable predictions include:

1. Akin to broadband replacing 56k modems, a scalable blockchain solution (either layer-1 or layer-2) will emerge to support a new class of crypto applications that attracts about one billion users by 2030.
2. One of the dominant networks will integrate a privacy solution, replacing the current transaction completion process, much like HTTPS supplanted HTTP for internet browsing and communication.
3. The next round of successful crypto startups will drive non-trading or speculative use-cases, a trend that, Brian notes, is already starting to get some legs.
4. Decentralization will grow as non-custodial wallets, dApps, and even DEXes improve usability. But crypto on-ramps will remain centralized, mimicking a “traditional financial services model.”
   

Why it matters:

• It should not surprise anyone that the CEO of the largest U.S. crypto exchange believes DEXes will fail to supplant centralized on-ramps. In contrast to Brian's prediction, companies like Wyre are introducing less trust-dependent on-ramp solutions for decentralized trading venues. Despite the progress, there are significant customer educations and user-experience hurdles (and perhaps some regulatory challenges) to cross before solutions like decentralized fiat-to-crypto exchanges could replace their custodial counterparts.
• Brian's privacy prediction seems in-line with recent developments: privacy-focused crypto chains are facing regulatory scrutiny (as evidenced by exchange delistings). At the same time, other privacy initiatives built on the more dominant networks (e.g., Ernst & Young's ZKP technology on Ethereum or Schnorr Signatures on Bitcoin) are gaining steam. This trend could continue as the top projects and technology tend to gravitate towards networks with the most users.