Bitcoin: What’s Coming in the Year Ahead
Design by Sylvia Yang. Animation by Andrew Embury, Ricardo Mendes, Ronaldo Serrano, Daniel Elder.
Bitcoin’s meteoric rise this year has attracted tons of attention, but most institutional investors are still watching from the sidelines, regulators have yet to issue comprehensive rules, and corporations are still mostly testing only blockchain technology. Whether bitcoin matures or crashes will largely depend on how these players' relationship with the cryptocurrency evolves.
More than 100 cryptocurrency hedge funds have opened in the past two years. Still, bitcoin has big detractors, with JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon famously calling it a fraud. On the regulatory front, the latest action from the Securities and Exchange Commission was to say that some digital tokens will be considered securities, but the lack of concrete action against issuers eased concerns that the U.S. would take a tougher stance. The real clampdown came in China and South Korea, whose regulators banned initial coin offerings.