Half a year has gone by. Let's look ahead to the next six months.
Our half-year review will come out next week in combination with our Sector Analysis Report. A week later, we will share our Rotation Report with you.
For the remaining six months of 2020, I am focussing on a couple of topics:
- Prime Brokerage
- ETH 2.0
- DeFi
Prime Brokerage
I'm not terribly interested in the kind of services that might be developed next. To me, it is more interesting to see how market players will consolidate. Why is an exchange purchasing that trading platform? Or, why is a given storage provider merging with that OTC broker? I guess the million dollar question is when will a larger traditional bank come in and buy any of these service providers? I believe that when this happens, the race will be on!
ETH 2.0
This is a long awaited and often hyped-up topic. Will it eventually, maybe, possibly, happen in 2020? Who knows. But the topic keeps coming back, and is as hot as ever. It is most certainly partially responsible for the good ETH performance during the first half of 2020. I'm not a developer, nor do I have any insights into the progress of the project, but I'm curious how the transition from PoW to PoS is going to work for such a large coin and community. I'm sure there are so many attack vectors and gaming theory points that have not been properly thought through yet. I'm just saying... things could get messy. One cross that we watch as a sentiment indicator is ETHETC. We have mentioned this before in a previous market commentary.
DeFi
In my view, this has been the most hyped-up (or maybe overhyped) sector over the past few months. Nevertheless, I believe it is one of the sectors that is adding some proper value to the world at large. It will fill the gap (or the missing services) that banks should provide their customers. And if the banks are already providing it, the DeFi community can do it much cheaper and can easier adapt to actual client needs. Don't get me wrong. This space is still very much underdeveloped and needs to grow up to be able to become a serious competitor to commercial banks and their services. All the scams and exploitations from smart hackers draining money needs to be reduced dramatically. In my personal opinion, I believe that we are on the right track. In the future, there will be more useful applications.
There is no doubt in my mind that the remaining six months will be exciting ones!
Market Commentary