Happy New Year everyone – Recap 2024 and Outlook 2025
In 2024 we started the year with an almost messianic expectation of a couple of events.
First and foremost, the SEC’s (the US markets watchdog) approval of BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF investment fund. An approval that did indeed arrive, albeit obtorto collo, in the first days of January. This triggered the first big jump in prices and threw the weight of the largest asset manager on the planet behind the crypto sector, which until then had been viewed with great skepticism, when not openly opposed, by traditional finance.
Secondly, the scheduled four-yearly halving of the rewards for generating (mining) Bitcoin. In the end, however, the halving didn’t produce any significant jump in prices. After all, expecting fireworks just because they happened in similar circumstances in the past is always bold, to say the least.
And now, what about 2025?
Well, having the D. Trump-E. Musk duo at the helm, the real white swan that changed the 2024 narrative, is in a sense a guarantee, although the new President is certainly no stranger to sudden U-turns, including on crypto.
And then, of course, there’s the proposal on the table from Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis, unknown to most until recently, to set up, alongside gold, a Bitcoin allocation within the national strategic reserve. However, it’s hard to say how far this proposal, born in the wake of Donald Trump’s statements during the election campaign, can actually be implemented. Of course, if it were, it would be an epoch-making move.
As for the golden girl of blockchains, Ethereum and its crypto Ether (and similar ones like Solana, Cardano, etc.), it’s dead calm. Hard to imagine, in 2025, swarms of whirling smart contracts changing our lives. Anyway, in the coming weeks we’ll continue exploring real estate tokenization technology, which we began to look at towards the end of last year.
That leaves Ripple. Here it will be interesting to see whether, with Gary Gensler’s departure from the SEC, the Commission’s attitude will change in the lawsuit that, dragging on for years, has sunk the XRP crypto (which, as you’ll remember, is aimed at interbank transfers). XRP is a potential competitor to the ubiquitous, dollar-centric SWIFT system, the real linchpin of US power, so opposed by the BRICS and threatened by the dedollarization process these countries would like to pursue. In any case, since the news of the change at the top of the SEC, XRP has gained +500% in a few days (before pulling back to the current +400%, which is still not bad at all).
In the new year, we can also keep an eye every now and then on innovative projects, Worldcoin above all, if only because Sam Altman (OpenAI and ChatGPT) is behind it, and not all the world has the same resistance to innovation as our bureaucratic superpower. Finally, an eye on the Oracles Chainlink and Pyth Network too, should smart contracts ever shake off their torpor and need reliable information about what’s happening in the real world, outside the blockchains.
We’ll see, hoping not to run into a swan during the year, a black one this time. It’s comforting, for what it’s worth, that the Financial Times of the last day of last year, in its 2025 forecasts, sees Bitcoin at $200k by the end of 2025, while the boldest crypto fans are already secretly starting to put their faith again in the famous, albeit by now posthumous and expired, prediction by John McAfee.
