Blockdaemon’s Barnaby Hodgkins recently sounded off on the future of the blockchain/cryptocurrency sector at the Token2049 event on April 20 in Dubai.
Despite a freak storm delivering the most rainfall the United Arab Emirates has seen in some 75 years, attendees were able to brave the weather.
Hodgkins, Blockdaemon’s Senior Manager of Growth Strategy, sat down with Cointelegraph’s Ezra Reguerra to discuss the current state of the industry as well as what to expect going forward.
As to the current state of the industry, Hodgkins says there’s still room for growth:
“I would probably say that institutional adoption in the space is at its highest point it’s ever been, but I wouldn’t mistake that with saying that there’s loads of institutional adoption.”
He expanded, adding that there was work yet to be done, “It’s the highest it’s ever been and as a result there’s a lot of reason to be bullish around what’s happening.”
Hodgkins cited the launch of the first Bitcoin spot ETFs in January and their ensuing adoption rates as bullish indicators. But there appears to be plenty of runway left for adoption:
“When it comes to wide scale adoption in institutions across the spectrum of institutions, from asset managers to pension funds, to hedge funds, to sovereign wealth funds, I think we’re still very much at the foot of the hill.”
Blockdaemon, and by extension its growth manager, Hodgkins, are well positioned to garner a bird’s eye view of the blockchain industry. The company, according to Hodgkins, is “the world’s leading Blockchain infrastructure provider.”
Its services span “the entire spectrum of infrastructure needs from dedicated node access, API access ability, to run validators and staking rewards, all the way through to MPC wallet technology.”
Hodgkins says the next few cycles could produce even more industry-changing events. “What we might see in the near future is, potentially, an Ethereum ETF,” he told Cointelegraph, adding that the myriad use cases for blockchain and cryptocurrency technology could lead to mass adoption by industries such as the automotive and transportation sectors.
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