CEO of CoinDesk on the Current State of Blockchain

Kevin Worth, CEO of the leading digital media, events and information services company for the crypt asset and blockchain technology community, visited Lehigh University to talk to Lehigh FinTech Group members on the current state of blockchain. Prior to CoinDesk, Kevin had leadership roles at Bloomberg Media, NY Times, and was the founding CEO of The Deal. Kevin graduated from Harvard Business School in 1997 and Lehigh University in 1991. 

Each year, CoinDesk hosts its annual Consensus Summit, the largest blockchain technology gathering in the world. In addition, CoinDesk puts out a consensus report about the current state of blockchain which describes the progress it has made over the previous year. In that, CoinDesk's goal is to inform the masses about what blockchain really is and how it is revolutionizing everyone's lives.

The report initially compares year to date returns of tradition assets vs. digital assets. While traditional assets such as global real estate, gold, U.S. equities, and global equities only saw returns of  4.2%, 11.9%, 18.5%, and 23.0% respectively, Bitcoin saw returns of 1278.4% and all other digital assets saw returns of 707.3% within 2017. This shows the sheer increase in demand of digital assets and how the demands have greatly increased due to their increased benefits. Some of these benefits in public blockchains include having an immutable ledger, fast settlement times of 10 minutes or less, easy auditing, reduced need for trust, and reduced security risks associated with centralization-trust third party.

Global cryptocurrency transactions saw exponential growth in the four quarters of 2017 where there were approximately 376,000 crypto currency transactions in Q1 vs. 1,047,000 transactions within Q4.  At the same time, cryptocurrency transition cost rose for all major cryptocurrencies. For example, the transition fee for Bitcoin in 2017 was $0.62 in Q1 but it significantly increased to $13.20 in Q4. Since the dawns of blockchain in 2012, many blockchain term search amounts have increased more than 100% as well.

Probably one of the singlehandedly largest increases in market caps for cryptocurrencies is that of Bitcoin where it has increased more than 300% from $71.6bn in October of 2017 to $224.9bn in December of 2017. During this quarter, the price of Bitcoin varied from $2000 to $5000, which is the second largest quarterly dollar variation.

There is no cryptocurrency exchange without the consumer, and the report highlights the sentiments of the consumer in this market. Currently, 69% of respondents own Bitcoin while 21% have already sold theirs. Only 10% of respondents said that they have never owned Bitcoin. Beyond Bitcoin, ETH, and XRP, 86% of respondents stated that they own other forms of cryptocurrency as well. Overall, with the gains of cryptocurrency, 84.1% of people invested their gains right back into cryptocurrencies, showing that there is a large level of buyer confidence for cryptocurrencies in the foreseeable future. This buyer nature will continue to shape the strength of the cryptocurrency world and ultimately shape the future of how currency is used and traded by people in the whole world.