The Alliance Bernstein pair believe that institutional investors will get in on the action, using token assets to invest in early stage protocols of other cryptocurrencies.
“If the clients demand crypto token assets, Wall Street banks will have to respond with crypto token financial products.”
ICOs aren’t going away either, according to the duo, but will eventually exist in a regulated form.
“Though China has banned exchanges and ICOs for now, it could come up with a clear framework for regulating it considering almost 50% of token mining capacity resides in China,” they add. “Outright bans in a decentralised network would simply amount to playing whack-a-mole.”
And with news this week that online marketplace Amazon has registered three cryptocurrency domains (fuelling speculation that it will accept them as payments) and derivatives group CME plans to launch a bitcoin futures contract, should help bitcoin shed its dark web stigma, says David Jinks, ParcelHero’s head of consumer research.
The latter development he finds particularly exciting because it could bring more institutional investors into the space.
“Once bitcoin are traded like any other futures investment, and welcomed by Amazon as easily as pounds and dollars, then they will cease to be the enfant terrible of finance, and instead become a solid investment beyond the reach of national governments’ and banks’ interference,” says Jinks.
