Crypto seems to have two functions. The first is when your friends won’t stop talking about it. The second is when your friends want to you to stop talking about it.
Having watched the boom and bust cycles in the web3 world since 2013, I’ve learned to never write off cryptocurrencies completely and never wait for the most bullish actions to materialize — at least in the short term.
Exchange explores startups, markets and money.
Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get the Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
But in the last decade or so, blockchain-based technology has managed to keep from going away. Regardless of what the general public or investors think about it at any given time, the community of believers and its builders are willing to weather any downturn.
All that in hand, I think 2024 will be a good year for blockchain-based products and services, but not because I expect the venture capital enthusiasm of the 2021 era to pick up again. No, instead, it appears that there are a number of market forces in favor of crypto that could lead to a better year for the technology and its startup constituents.
Rising prices are helping to boost transactions and consumer interest, for one. But there are others worth considering, including regulation and its possible crystallization, as well as the possibility of a clear consumer product for sale. Let’s dig in and see if we can find some good news!
2024 bullish signals for crypto
Fully expecting texts from crypto-negative friends in response to this story, I think it’s important to write here that I don’t own any crypto material. I have a minimal amount of crypto tokens in a Coinbase account I set up for testing purposes, and I believe I own some zero-value NFTs stored in a MetaMask wallet I set up, once again, to learn and learn. So I’m not talking about my book here, and to my friends who take anything TechCrunch+ writes that has a positive view of crypto as a personal failure on my part, please relax.
