What is the most important thing to have on the radar in the new year in the crypto world? We have identified eight different topics on which a lot will happen next year. The trends for 2020. Infrastructure protocols as incubator for future business models.
This article is part of a cooperation and was originally published on 10x10.ch
Benefits of public infrastructure protocols
The benefits of public infrastructure protocols should continue to be evident in 2020. 2019 was the year of Uniswap, a decentralised exchange protocol programmed by Hayden Adams within a few months. The project has shown one thing above all: success can be achieved by something that has no business model, has no token and does not even know a KYC implementation. Uniswap is not just an ordinary decentralized exchange based on a protocol. It does not work with order books, but with an algorithmic pricing mechanism that guarantees liquidity and the lowest possible trading margins. Uniswap makes it possible for anyone to provide liquidity and thus become a market maker. The protocol offers incentives by rewarding liquidity providers with trading fees.
Decentralised liquidity pools for exchanges
But then came the supposed damper: the Uniswap developers staying in the USA were condemned to exclude countries like North Korea, Sudan and Iran by geo-blocking. So does Uniswap have central points of attack after all? The Uniswap user interface might have, but not the Uniswap protocol. The user interface runs on the "old" Internet, which in turn runs on centralized servers. The protocol, however, runs on a public, decentralized block chain. The case of Uniswap shows what will increasingly happen in 2020 as a result of censorship attempts: Alternative user interfaces will be activated. Users will host their own local user interface to be able to access the new financial protocols at any time. Or the user interfaces will be offered completely via "peer-to-peer data systems" instead of "corporate-controlled cloud services".
A public financial infrastructure
From a bird's eye view, Uniswap does not have a bottleneck (except Ethereum) - but it also has no business model. It is a public infrastructure, no team makes money directly from it. The number of such public financial infrastructures will increase in 2020, which makes it increasingly clear that public, permissive protocols will not be limited to the IT world, but will also transform the financial world.
