# TOKEN2049 - Welcome to TOKEN2049 - Dave Chapman

- Channel: [TOKEN2049](https://streameth.org/token2049)
- Date: 2019-10-09
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-400t-CodvQ4
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=400t-CodvQ4

## Transcript

I think maybe there was too many after parties last night but we're starting a little bit late but we've got an amazing two days ahead of us first things first I definitely wanna say thanks to Ellis capital for putting on the event thank you for the speakers that are coming over the next two days thank you for our sponsors for making this whole event possible and most importantly thank you for you guys to attending attending this event this is the second time that Raphael and and Chris have put on token 2049 and I'm actually even more excited than when when i came last year it's going to be an amazing two days there's a lot of different topics we're going to talk about everything from you know stable coins the maturity of smart contracts the state of the futures market decentralization artificial intelligence it's gonna be a jam-packed 48 hours the interesting thing is that whilst this is the main event and the main piste there's an enormous amount of a price key we have the etherium super meetup coming tonight with vitalic we have the litecoin meet up tomorrow with Charlie Lee and we have an enormous amount of events all throughout Hong Kong to celebrate crypto week and it actually solidifies Hong Kong as the the premier jurisdiction in Asia for crypto and blockchain but it's been a year since the first token 2049 and a lot has happened I was gonna say what has happened in 2018 2018 started awesome everyone was a genius we bought crypto we held and it felt really good and then unfortunately things started to decline and you know Lambeau land looked further away and it sort of got a little bit dull we were heading towards a market capitalization of 1 trillion dollars you know there was people on the sidelines that were looking at this market cap it was peaking interest people had dismay dismissed it for a long time and when we were hit heading towards that 1 trillion dollar market cap it was starting to get a lot of interest unfortunately today that same asset class that same market cap for entirety of crypto is now only worth 130 billion dollars my Bitcoin that was 20,000 last year is now Mia is now worth a mere 20% of what it was at its all-time high trading around somewhere between almost $4,000 today so what happened last year we witnessed the hyperbolic means to raise capital okay and I'm talking obviously about icos or initial coin offerings there was no faster way to raise capital than to do Nico and we saw projects raised millions of dollars with some of the projects raising billions of dollars it was something that has never been seen before and no faster had we become drunk on these crazy returns these 20 X 30 X returns in weeks of this initial investment we then went through this phase of a hangover okay we were left scratching our heads trying to work out what it is what it was that people were actually investing in but the reality is that technology worked and I think what we'll be talking about one of the things today is what is this next potential boom using that same technology that we started with with icos meaning obviously security tokens so we'll talk about that today 2018 we saw more blockchain protocols introduced in 2018 than any form a year in blockchain history and the blockchain protocols were all claiming to be better stronger faster shinier than Bitcoin and the reality is that some of these claims are still yet to be seen in the real world you know they haven't been battle hardened they haven't been tested and some of these claims you know about being better faster stronger or shinier you know we're still yet to see whether that actually materializes and I personally think that's one of the reasons why bitcoins dominance is back to its all-time high of over 50% in summary 2018 saw more Forks than a diplomatic donor dinner party stable tough crowd well guys here to give me a break here last year we saw a stable point of stable points we saw the race for stable coin supremacy you know crypto participants have been fed up with tether and they were demanding full audits transparency insurance legit legitimate banking channels for these USD fiat alternatives and as a result we saw a lot of it's coming to the market we snell have over you know what I'd say thirty genuine contenders for the stable coin supremacy you know packs us DC true USD have all come in to the market to try and fill this gap where tether has sort of left it and the irony of this position today though is that despite you know all these new entrants coming in to try and fill these attributes that were missing tether still remains the largest market capitalization stable coin today so you can almost say you know we all as participants we demand we want better but at the same time it would almost sound that some participants don't actually care last year we was no different from any other year in crypto history we continued to see exchanges hacked we continue to see thefts from the venues that we do call crypto exchanges in January of 2018 we saw the world's largest exchange theft of over half a billion dollars that is insane unfortunately I'm of the opinion that this will continue until either decentralized exchanges take its place it's a big that's a rather big claim or whether we see regulation and insurance more legitimate transparent credible venues come into operation will 2019 be the year of the decks we'll have to wait and see so the sector in 2018 we experienced extreme volatility and the industry was chaotic twith mismanaged expectations so all in all it was a pretty dark and gloomy 2018 I think we can say that winter isn't coming I think we can say that winter has hit us full force and we're probably maybe potentially as we'll discuss over the next two days maybe potentially on the rebound so 2018 was dark and gloomy but it wasn't all that bad despite the market consolidation we saw enormous amount of investment actually come into the crypto sector in the way of infrastructure and I'm not just talking about icos the ten largest crypto investments or crypto infrastructure investments last year which were traditional equity investments not utility coins not redemption not membership coins or anything else to do with with crypto still raised over 1.5 billion dollars so there is still an enormous amount of infrastructure coming into this ecosystem despite the consolidation 2018 saw a more institutional participation come into the scene and we're seeing that continuation happened today despite that consolidation with the likes of Julius Bauer JP Morgan you know a fidelity all participating and taking a stake in the crypto and blockchain space 2018 we saw a lot of regulators actually acknowledge that this asset class is here to stay you know when I came into this business in 2013 the view of stance from the regulators was you know this isn't money it's not a security we don't want to regulate it and some regulators went as far is actually trying to ban Bitcoin and we all know how sort of silly that is and in in those circumstances the regulators have actually done a u-turn so we are seeing more regulatory clarity legitimize and provide credibility to this asset class it's also defining the playbook the rulebook that's helping people that have been sitting on the sidelines to enter this market understanding how it is that they're going to interact with this with this industry you know Hong Kong is obviously my hometown I'm a little bit biased but I do believe that the regulators in Asia are actually the most innovative with the likes of Japan Hong Kong Singapore all taking very vocal and clear stance on what it is when where crypto and blockchain is going Raphael had asked me last night to provide some predictions it's something that I don't generally like doing but in you know I can't say no to Raphael so my predictions for this year demand for professional and credible trading venues will increase there's a lot of the demographic and the maturity of the participants in this asset class have definitely improved and whilst the demographic has improved for the market participants that people want to trade crypto the lack of professional trading venues is still something that we yet to see but I do believe we'll see that in 2019 demand for institutional products is going to grow with the likes of our cell we're talking to clients today and they want options they want lending products structured products synthetic swaps all within Bitcoin and crypto and I do believe that we'll see a very strong rise in the options products that was that we offer today regulatory clarity will definitely assist with the professionalization and the legitimization of this asset class and with respect to this new scrutiny and this new you definition of regulation of the strong opinion that some of these compliance you know requirements will actually cause a headache for some of the some of the participants today and we will see some consolidation with the trading venues out today will we'll see some mergers and we will most likely see some people actually exit this asset class all together as a result security tokens are coming we've got a number of discussions over the next 48 hours discussing security tokens a good friend of mine Anthony Lewis from r3 is on a moderating panel today my personal opinion is that it is very much still a chicken-and-egg we all want security tokens we all want security tokens secondary markets but we still don't really know how it's all going to work and hopefully that's something that will have some clarity on over the next two days we will see continued improvements on on chain and off chain scaling and I'm sure that we'll have some healthy debate around that sort of topic and finally my prediction is that the custody piece of crypto it will be solved if it's not solved already potentially solving one of the most difficult components preventing a lot of this institutional flow from entering the market today which is holding Bitcoin and crypto and we'll see some of those discussions as well on closing remarks we have to remember that this asset class is tiny so so tiny ok Bitcoin only traded 2.2 trillion u.s. dollars in 2018 and a hundred and thirty billion dollar total market cap of crypto it doesn't usually peak a lot of interest okay that's just fact but if we in this room believe that people want greater financial transparency and if we as the people in this room believe that people want to control their own money and if we believe that this technology has the potential to provide financial inclusion to 50% of the world's population that don't have access today then we have to surely at the very least this hat we have to acknowledge that this has some potential to disrupt finance as we know it or at the very least help keep heat finance honest guys the next two day is comprised of Asia's premier crypto event and you guys are here okay so prepare yourself you challenged prepare yourself to be inspired prepare yourself to be excited as our traders at OSL say when they respect the trading crypto made the trend to be your friend have a great two days thank you very much