Welcome to Forkast Forecasts 2022. In this series, leaders, innovators and visionaries in blockchain-related fields tell Forkast.News their predictions for the year ahead.
Alan Vey
Alan Vey is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Aventus Network, a layer-2 scaling and efficiency system for smart contracts blockchains such as Ethereum. Vey is also a co-founder and board member at Artos Systems, an event ticketing management system powered by blockchain technology. Vey and his Artos co-founder Annika Monary were named to the 2021 Forbes 30 under 30 Europe list. Before diving into the blockchain and crypto realm, Vey was an associate at Deloitte’s entrepreneurial business department and a quantitative developer at Brevan Howard.
Predictions for 2022
Smart contracts rivalry
“I expect to see big growth from NFTs (non-fungible tokens), especially to some of the slightly smaller-market-cap blockchains like Solana or Cardano, which now support smart-contract functionality, which is a big change allowing their ecosystem to grow. Solana has obviously had some teething pains, but is increasing nicely in the NFT space with a few of the other players. Polkadot will also grow massively. Now that they’ve just launched their parachain auctions, the real benefit of Polkadot and the 100 parachains that can plug in there can be realized.”
DeFi rally is just getting started
“Certain elements of it really need a fundamental structured framework. The regulators have been coming closer and closer to their understanding here. I believe with improved frameworks and more clear rules next year, not only will it mean more investment can flow into building more projects, but also the adoption of different decentralized finance mechanics will become significantly more de-risked for any sort of significant existing companies.”
Interoperability takes center stage
“The various smaller players have started catching up [to Ethereum]. And now, what we’re starting to see, even what we’ve seen sort of in some NFT sales is, you’ve got siloed pockets of community… DeFi assets need to draw on the biggest liquidity pools possible. NFT communities need to reach as many eyeballs as possible. Different assets need to be able to talk to each other across these siloed pockets of value. So interoperability is going to become front and center in the blockchain conversation.
Public networks’ proven security
“People aren’t stealing money out of people’s wallets, it’s more just scams that make people send their money to the wrong places. So the public networks are becoming, or users are knowing how to use them better. User experience or key management is improving. The security has been a proven model now for a while, so we’ll see more of a transition to using public open blockchain rather than permissioned and private blockchains, much like we saw when the internet first launched.
