The ultimate question at the end of the year: Will there be a bull market in 2019?

On Christmas Eve, Bitcoin ushered in a long-awaited wave of growth. On the daily level, Bitcoin has risen by about 30% in the past 8 trading days.

For the crypto market led by Bitcoin, 2018 was a very difficult year. The continuous decline in the market almost made traders start to "doubt their lives."

In 2019, is there any hope for the coins held by investors? Does Bitcoin's performance this week mean that the bottom has been confirmed? When will the bull market come?

Xiaocong APP interviewed a number of venture capitalists, blockchain company founders and industry insiders, who expressed their outlook on the market in the coming year and their expectations for the industry ecosystem from different perspectives.

When will the next bull market come? Three months later? One year later?

Recently, many reports and analyses believe that the price of Bitcoin has reached its bottom.

New York research firm Delphi Digital pointed out in its latest report in December that although Bitcoin will face selling pressure in the short term, from the perspective of the boom-and-bust cycle, it will bottom out in Q1 2019 at the latest.

Timestamp Capital believes that, judging from the cyclical law, Bitcoin may still have several months of decline cycle to go, and the future rise cycle may exceed 3 years. Based on the historical rise and fall, the price of Bitcoin is close to the bottom area. Of course, judging the bottom based on historical data is always a very dangerous behavior.

Bloomberg analyst Mike McGlone said that most indicators in the market show that Bitcoin is currently approaching the most oversold period in history, and Bitcoin is expected to form a new bottom below the current price next year.

“If we are not at the bottom, we are very close,” Han Kao, founder of Crypto Briefing, wrote in his latest email to clients. “The next few weeks may be a little tough after the mini year-end rally we have seen so far,” but “the worst is over.”

The investment professionals interviewed by Xiaocong generally do not care much about the bull and bear markets. Similar to the analysis agencies, the investment community and the "chain circle" generally believe that next year will still be a period of fluctuations, and the bull market will not come so soon.

Bobby Chao, founding partner of Draper Dragen, said that the market will be volatile in the next 3-6 months, with possible ups and downs, but the fundamentals will not be shaken. After the volatility period, next year will basically be an adjustment period, and there may be a situation of "some happy and some sad".

Edith Yeung, partner of venture capital firm 500 Startups, said frankly that it does not chase bull or bear markets: "As an early-stage investor, we will not chase bull or bear markets. We will continue to focus on technology and we hope to promote applications. So it really doesn't matter to us. But then again, (the bull market comes again) may be a year later."

Chris McCann, a Silicon Valley blockchain investor and former executive of venture capital firm Greylock, analyzed three potential possibilities for the bull market:

First, someone has actually found applications beyond currency that can drive demand for more new products.

Second, the really big hedge funds, VCs, private equity funds, and family offices are seriously entering this space.

Third, if regulatory uncertainty is eliminated and there are very clear rules, then the issuance of a pure utility token will trigger a new wave of ICOs.

One thing these three possibilities have in common is to see what can create new market demand for tokens.

However, there are also some individuals who are very optimistic about the market.

Rune Bentien, entrepreneur-in-residence at ConsenSys Ventures’ London office, believes the bull run is here:

I think the bull market has arrived. Maybe outsiders can't see it, but I am more optimistic about this industry and ecosystem.

Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and founder of ConsenSys, recently declared on Twitter that he believes the crypto industry has hit bottom in 2018. The bottom is marked by an "epic amount" of fear, uncertainty, and skepticism.

Lou Kerner, partner at venture capital and strategy firm CryptoOracle, proposed three speculations on the future trend of Bitcoin prices:

1) Bitcoin price is no longer considered a store of value. In this case, Bitcoin is "finished".

2) Bitcoin’s function as a store of value exceeds that of gold. In this case, with the current global gold bullion supply of about 2.5 billion ounces and a market value of $3.1 trillion, each Bitcoin would be worth more than $145,000.

3) Bitcoin ranks second in terms of store of value (silver is widely considered the second best asset for storing value). There are about 4 billion ounces of silver with a total market value of $58 billion, which would put the price of Bitcoin at $3,346 today .

What to watch out for in the market next year

In addition to their views on the market bottom, the experts who chatted with Xiaocong also shared their views on the potential highlights of the market next year.

Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper believes that the biggest opportunity in 2019 is the application of Bitcoin, and in 2020 and 2021, Bitcoin and its applications will achieve amazing growth:

Bitcoin will be used for commerce and as a simpler payment method (using mobile phones to pay with Bitcoin), and more retailers and e-commerce companies will accept Bitcoin. The main beneficiaries in 2019 will also include engineers who make Bitcoin easier to use and safer to store.

In 2020 and 2021, I think we will see incredible growth in Bitcoin and its applications. Then, there will be very interesting applications of blockchain to replace all bookkeeping, including replacing legal structures with software.

Asheesh Birla, senior vice president of product management at Ripple, is more optimistic about banks’ interest in the crypto space and believes that blockchain-based loans will become a major trend in the future:

Some banks are very active in providing services not only to the crypto space, and I think you’re going to hear a lot more good news next year as they continue to launch new services.

In the next five years, I think loans and other products based on blockchain technology will become a major trend.

In addition, in terms of public chains, the competition between ETH and EOS for the title of “No. 1 public chain” will also become a major attraction in the blockchain field. Whether EOS will see large-scale applications first or Ethereum will successfully expand first may determine the outcome of the “ranking battle” between the two public chains.

Ethereum developers and investors have high expectations for the progress of Ethereum's fourth phase, Serenity, next year. Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and founder of ConsenSys, said in an interview with Xiaocong that he believes the theme of Ethereum in 2019 will be scalability:

As 2018 draws to a close, we are seeing new breakthroughs in scalability every week. We are seeing new state channels, new sidechains (Plasma) being built. There are games and exchanges using the new scaling technology we are talking about here, which is a new system that is connected to Ethereum through a sidechain with the help of Plasma, and this sidechain can handle 65,000 transactions per second. Because it is connected to Ethereum with the help of Plasma, it is also secured by the trust layer based on Ethereum. If there is a problem in the expansion layer 2, everyone can get their tokens back in layer 1. In 2019, we will see the emergence of many games and other applications using these technologies.

Many EOS developers believe that EOS may surpass Ethereum next year.

The Lumeos development team said that from a user's perspective, EOS provides a better solution and a better user experience. EOS allows large-scale applications, and once large-scale applications appear on EOS, it will help it become one of the largest blockchains. In contrast, Ethereum still has many DApp design problems and user usage issues.

However, some EOS developers believe that Ethereum is solving the scalability problem. Whether EOS can surpass ETH depends on whether Ethereum solves the scalability problem first, or whether EOS builds up its community first and reaches a scale that can compete with Ethereum.

The issue of scalability is not only crucial to Ethereum, but also affects the success or failure of other projects.

Han Kao, founder of Crypto Briefing, believes that the foundation (of blockchain success) is to implement a second-layer blockchain solution that can scale to meet current business needs, and this expansion will minimize the impact on decentralization and security performance. It doesn’t matter where the specific expansion method comes from, whether it comes from existing projects such as Ethereum’s Casper and Sharding, or other second-layer expansion solutions like Zilliqa or Quarkchain. What matters is that the expansion solution needs to be online, tested, and even thousands of nodes around the world participate in block production. Only then can it be said that this expansion method really exists.

This will be the hardest part. Once the scalability issues are solved, we will see some momentum in blockchain adoption in Q3/Q4 2019.