Researchers at Circle Research concluded that the past year was not a total failure. For example, the volume of investments in blockchain companies in 2018 exceeded $ 5 billion.

This amount is three times more than a year earlier and is six times higher than in 2016.

Cryptocurrency capitalization

The volume of investments grew despite a pronounced bear market. The graph below illustrates how the capitalization of the leading cryptocurrencies decreased over the year:

Bitcoin transaction amount and commission amount

Compared with January of last year in December, the average daily transaction volume decreased by 8%. But the average size of the commission for this period decreased by 99%:

Lightning network

An impressive growth is demonstrated by the second-tier Lightning Network:

Note that the other day the capacity of this network exceeded 600 BTC .

dApps

Over the past two years, a huge number of decentralized Ethereum applications have appeared:

Also, applications based on EOS, perhaps, the main competitor of Ethereum, are emerging at a fast pace:

Comparing these two networks, it is worth noting that Ethereum runs 18 times more applications than EOS. However, there are three times more dapps on EOS than on Ethereum.

As for ICO, the report states that 88% of the funds were raised in the first half of 2018. Then, due to regulatory uncertainty in this area, the activity decreased significantly.

Key trends in 2019: steylcoin, security tokens and the institutionalization of the cryptocurrency market.

Recall, according to the CipherTrace report, in 2018 almost $ 1 billion was stolen from bitcoin exchanges.

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