How crypto went from nothing to $ 3 billion in a decade

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The ecosystem of digital assets (sometimes referred to as “cryptocurrency” or simply “crypto”) has grown from nothing to nearly $ 3 billion (£ 2.23 billion) in a decade.

This open source technology has traveled the world at unprecedented speed.

Despite this rapid growth, the investment trades industry has been slow to engage with this new technology and the opportunities and risks it presents.

Seeking to understand how this change impacted the professional investment industry, WisdomTree recently commissioned a survey, conducted by CoreData Research, and interviewed 600 professional investors across Europe, ranging from financial advisory firms wholesale to asset managers and family offices.

Investors surveyed are responsible for around 400 billion euros (£ 3.41 billion) in assets under management.

The results of this survey are worth dwelling on – and point to an underserved segment of the market. More than eight in 10 European advisers (83%) have asked their clients to invest in cryptocurrencies / digital assets.

Still, nearly a third of clients (32%) intend to break out of their advisor relationship to allocate to the asset class. If we went back five years, these results would have been very different.

As an industry, digital assets can no longer be considered ‘nascent’. Last week saw the thirteenth anniversary of the publication of the Bitcoin White Paper, which paved the way for this decade of technological change and evolution.

The speed at which this open source software spread across the world was unprecedented – and in large part due to the saturation point reached by Internet access (especially through “smart” phones).

This comes at a time when the digital asset ecosystem has marked a climax, spurred by the approval by the Securities and Exchange Commission of Bitcoin futures exchange-traded funds in the United States, with nearly $ 3 billion equivalent. in market capitalization (for example, the price of coins / tokens multiplied by the market price).

A critical mass has been reached which cannot be ignored. In just the past two months, the US Treasury Department has released an official report on “stablecoins” (digital tokens that correspond 1 to 1 with a US dollar) and the People’s Bank of China has called such transactions “illegal. “.

El Salvador has “bitcoinized” and now has Bitcoin with the US dollar as legal tender. Large companies have also spotted these opportunities and go to great lengths to seize them.

Facebook, one of the largest and most influential companies in the world, has rebranded itself as Meta, a reference to the virtual “metaverse” of which digital assets will be a part.

As it becomes increasingly clear that digital assets are here to stay, the professional investment industry must catch up. The good news is that there is more quality information now available to familiarize yourself with this wave of technological change – and the opportunities it presents.

For example, WisdomTree’s Crypto Insights Hub covers a wide range of 101 articles and explanations, videos as well as information from our Digital Assets team.

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