What will the financial sector look like in 2030 after spending the decade challenging the incumbent financial services? Leeor Shimron, a Forbes Contributor, believes that crypto exchanges are poised to capture the growth in this space.
To date, crypto exchanges have provided users with a first contact point with an ever-increasing range of crypto assets. Lets’ not forget that the first crypto enthusiasts were retail investors who for the first time were able to access a new asset class before the institutional investors. As a result, most exchanges, such as Coinbase and Binance, were set up to service demand from the retail investor. For example, as Shimron remarks, “In just 8 years, Coinbase propelled crypto to the mainstream serving over 30 million users.”
Follow the Internet’s history
There have been several commentators who have suggested that the crypto story is very similar to the emergence of the Internet. The Internet was a fundamentally disruptive and paradigm shifting technology, and crypto very well may exhibit similar changes, mimicking the growth in Internet usage.
Illustrating this claim, Shimron cites the statistics: “User adoption of the internet reached 10% of American households in 1995, five years after the first web browser was launched. User adoption reached 50% in the U.S. by the year 2000.” Currently, US adoption of crypto is at around 5%, and hasn’t seen the same rate of adoption as the Internet. This is caused by “issues of scalability, privacy, and ease of use,” something that the Internet also had to overcome.
However, if Bitcoin’s growth story follows that of the Internet, it should achieve user adoption of between 20–50% by the year 2030.
Crypto exchange growth
Shimron applies a similar metric to exchange growth. He writes, “To project future exchange growth in the U.S., I assumed 5% user adoption of crypto in the US currently and calculated revenue growth if user adoption reaches 10% (conservative case), 20% (base case), and 50% (optimistic case) in the year 2029.”
The resulting scenarios for 2029 in terms of exchange revenues are: “$1.9 billion in the conservative case, $3.8 billion in the base case, and $9.6 billion in the optimistic case.”
He also remarks that although the 50% adoption may seem far-fetched, there are indicators supporting it, including ample growth potential amongst retail investors and demographic changes over the next decade, with more 18–39 year olds living in cities and being more familiar with digital technologies and virtual goods. These millennials will also inherit $68 trillion from the baby boomer generation by 2030, and they are looking for new ways to generate yield and store their wealth.
So, the future for crypto exchanges is bright, “as new use cases and killer apps emerge,” alongside retail users flooding the market and exchanges capture this growth.