Pricewaterhouse Cooper's (PWC) crypto lead for Hong Kong China region, Henri Arslanian, believes the crypto market churn in recent weeks was brought about by mass-betting by speculators. At the same time, 2019 would be a better year for the decentralized ledger currency, the big financial institution's representative shared with Bloomberg, Australia.
In Arslanian's view, 2018 was an action-packed year on two counts. Firstly, it saw the emerging industry grow tremendously and consolidated into more mature market processes, even as investors continued to grapple with the gradual price-slide that these cryptocurrencies witnessed on the back of the market correction driven by hard forking squabbles between Bitcoin developer communities. The disharmony in the world's largest traded cryptocurrency saw a split of the block and the price of the coin slide well below support level prices of $3,000 approximately.
Arslanian believes market correction and consolidation has had a marked impact on the industry today. But the continued involvement of the big Accountancy firms and other financial investors would eventually force regulatory reforms authorities in the US at least to set about framing framework which will be conducive to trading in cryptocurrency.
Currently, industry expectations are for futures and ETF's type of products to be permitted for trading rather than the stock-market style of trading for cryptocurrencies at reputed and not-so-reputed exchanges worldwide. The introduction of this genre of trading instruments will open up the market for the deep-pocketed institutional investors to have a presence in the new age trading assets.
While most of the experts and cryptocurrency captains are not committing to bitcoin prices in the New Year, all are firm that the year will be good for the deregulated currency. 2019 is expected to be the year when reforms for self-governance of crypto trading and other related products should come into vogue in most of the cryptocurrency using countries.
Big investment players such as Goldman Sachs have already marked their presence in the blockchain era by investing in BitGo a custodial services provider, as well as Circle, a company which wants to debut ETFs in the USA and is waiting eagerly for the regulator, the SEC to offer its consent.
An interesting observation by Arslanian clearly sets the status of the current market situation, bitcoin's price fall has cleansed or "cleared out the noise" in the crypto industry, just like bubble burst of the dot.com era at the turn of the millennium.