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.
Yuval Rooz
Yuval Rooz is co-founder and CEO at Digital Asset Holdings, a New York-based enterprise blockchain company. Digital Asset works with financial services, healthcare and supply-chain management companies to create business applications through distributed ledger technology. Their smart-contract programming language, Digital Asset Modeling Language, aims to automate transactions as well as digitize agreements. Prior to Digital Asset, Rooz managed an algorithmic trading desk at DRW Trading and helped launch DRW Venture Capital. He was also a trader and developer at Citadel.
Predictions for 2022
The Year of Regulation
“The strong momentum that we saw in 2021 have just made governments, regulators realize that they can’t avoid this industry. … What you’re going to see and already seeing now the signs of is that 2022 is the year of regulation where we’re going to see both good regulation — different countries that are thinking about changing their laws to fully dematerialized assets, which crypto assets are an example of — and then you’re going to see also countries that are concerned about the strength and power that blockchain and crypto are gathering and you’re going to see some bans out there, as we just saw in the last few weeks. To me, it’s a good sign for the industry because generally speaking, regulation is an indication that there’s something real that cannot be ignored.”
More money
“What we are seeing is a continuation of investments in the space. November was a record [for] investments in crypto and blockchain. And we’re going to keep on seeing the investment into the space continue at least until the middle of next year.”
Can’t touch this
“I don’t think that there is stopping this industry. What we will see are attempts by uninformed regulators to stifle innovation, and that’s mainly because of lack of education or the inability to keep pace with the private sector. I don’t believe that that will stop this industry, but I think that at the end of the day, uneducated power sources could slow things down. I don’t think that they can stop it.”
Evolution in traditional finance
“We’re starting to see layer 1s and layer 2s that are starting to push their offering towards more privacy and scalability. That will give backwind for more enterprise assets being tokenized. We’re seeing banks like JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and others that are really pushing the envelope. With technology maturing more in 2022, we will start seeing more traditional enterprise assets, TradFi, moving closer and closer to looking like crypto assets or fully tokenized assets.”