Blockchain Research Institute co-founder sees DeFi reaching trillion dollars in total value
Alex Tapscott of Ninepoint Partners also shares with Forkast.News his predictions for stablecoins and NFTs in 2022.
Welcome to Forkast Forecasts 2022. In this series, leaders, innovators and visionaries in blockchain-related fields tell Forkast.News their predictions for the year ahead.
Alex Tapscott
Alex Tapscott is managing director of the digital assets group at Ninepoint Partners, an investment firm with US$8 billion in assets under management and institutional contracts. He also chairs the advisory council of Prophecy DeFi, a publicly traded investment firm focused on decentralized finance. Tapscott and his father, Don Tapscott, co-founded the Canadian think tank Blockchain Research Institute and co-authored the 2016 book Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business, and the World.
Predictions for 2022:
Immense growth in total value locked in DeFi
“That value today is, depending on who you ask, US$100 to US$200 billion. I think the higher number is more accurate. We’re going to hit a trillion dollars sometime next year, and that’s a pretty conservative estimate.”
Acceleration of DeFi adopters
“Today, the number of DeFi users is around 3 million. Last year it was a couple hundred thousand, so pretty fair to assume that at the current rate of growth, we could get to 30 million, maybe even 50 million by the end of 2022.”
More stablecoin adoption
“Stablecoins are going to move from being assets that are used primarily in the crypto world as a settlement layer for trades and a medium of exchange in that universe to something that’s widely used by people outside. A lot of that growth is going to be driven by their integration into big payments networks like MasterCard and Visa.”
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) deepen bonds
“NFTs are going to go from something that we think of as primarily cultural assets, as art and collectibles, to a building block of a digital identity, which will help to anchor the metaverse as a way for individuals to have a persistent sovereign identity that they can take with them in the internet along with their digital goods.”