The CEO of the American cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase published its forecast for the crypto industry in the coming decade. According to him, the key trend will be the increasing demand for privacy and confidentiality.

Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, published a post in which he revealed his view on the future of cryptocurrencies in the next 10 years. Armstrong predicts that by the end of the decade, the number of blockchain users will reach one billion, and world governments will massively begin to switch to digital currencies.

Armstrong also predicts that over the next decade, new second-level scaling solutions, that will help scale the blockchain “by several orders of magnitude,” will be developed and this will stimulate the development of decentralized applications (dApps).

“Just like broadband replacing 56k modems led to many new applications on the internet (YouTube, Uber, etc), I believe scalability is a pre-requisite for the utility phase of crypto to really get going. Once we see blockchains with several orders of magnitude scalability improvements, we will new applications start to develop more rapidly.”

One of the key trends of the coming decade will be the focus on privacy. According to Armstrong, in the 20s there will be a cryptocurrency with a high level of confidentiality, which will gain wide usage. Finally, in the next 10 years, trading and speculation in crypto assets will fade into the background, giving way to the real useful applications of blockchain assets.

Coinbase CEO notes that in the future, digital currencies issued by central banks or other regulatory organizations will also be widespread. Among these coins, Armstrong mentions the Chinese digital yuan, adding, however, that he expects the emergence of supranational digital currencies tied not to one currency, but to a currency basket, and issued not by one central bank, but by supranational organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Bitcoin will rise in price to $200,000, Armstrong predicts, and more than half of the world's billionaires will have a share in any cryptocurrency business.

“It would mean that more pro technology people will have access to large amounts of capital in the 2020s. Presumably, this will increase the amount of investment made in science and technology, and I think we’ll also see more crypto folks turn to philanthropy (we’ve seen this already with efforts like the Pineapple fund, GiveCrypto.org, and the GivingPledge).”