In a series of tweets, and answers to follow-up questions, Bitcoiner Eric Wall, a.k.a. “the alt-coin slayer,” predicts what will happen in crypto in 2022. A few of these predictions stand out more than others, for example, Eric Wall doesn’t believe the Bitcoin upgrade “Taproot” will amass more than 20 percent adoption during 2022.
“Taproots improvements are not really game-changers for most people. Using Taproot is opt-in and requires wallets to upgrade, and since it won’t be a highly desired feature it’s just going to take time before adoption occurs,” Wall explains in a DM conversation with CryptoSlate.
Likewise, Wall doesn’t think DeFi will come to Bitcoin any time soon, however, this is not related to the Taproot upgrade.
“Taproot doesn’t enable DeFi. You need a much broader feature set than what Taproot provides to enable the types of DeFi activity we see on smart contract chains. Bitcoin isn’t built for DeFi and won’t attract DeFi use cases.”
Eric Wall, who used to be seen as a Bitcoin “maxi” by many in the past, seems to have shifted his position on “alts” slightly over the years. Wall is, for instance, convinced Ethereum’s shift to Proof-of-Stake consensus, the Merge, will be highly successful, not running into any significant issues. Wall’s basis for this is simple.
“I know several of the developers quite well.”
Another prediction by Eric Wall that might seem interesting to many touches on NFTs, of which, according to Wall, we’ve only seen the “first iteration” represented by “jpegs.” Eric Wall believes in social tokens as an example of “new exciting use cases for NFTs.” In a previous tweet, Wall writes:
“I own this NFT that gives you a free dinner with the Chief Protocol Architect of AVAX, @kevinsekniqi. What’s cool about this NFT is that you don’t need to buy it just because you want to eat dinner with @kevinsekniqi. You can buy it because you expect the demand (and therefore the value) of a dinner with @kevinsekniqi will be higher in the future. It’s basically a social token!”
According to Wall the following is what will happen to different projects, tokens and other parts of the crypto industry in 2022. The list is slightly edited for clarity.
1. Optimistic roll-ups on Ethereum will take off, but zk rollups won’t really.
2. Layer-2 tokens on Ethereum will surpass $50 billion in total market cap.
3. Ethereum (ETH) won’t flip Bitcoin (BTC).
4. Ethereum killers (SOL, AVAX, LUNA, ADA, etc.) won’t flip ETH either.
5. The Bitcoin upgrade Taproot won’t amass more than 20 percent adoption.
6. DeFi will continue to not happen on Bitcoin.
7. Lightning Network (Bitcoin) adoption will be underwhelming. We won’t surpass 6000 BTC in public Lightning Network channels.
8. Stablecoins won’t migrate back to Bitcoin. Tether stablecoin (USDT) adoption on the Lightning Network won’t get traction.
9. Polygon’s zk rollup tech acquisitions won’t go anywhere.
“JPEG NFTs was just the first iteration”
10. People will find new exciting use cases for NFTs. It turns out, JPEGs was just the first iteration.
11. There will be a lot more thots (jokes) in crypto. Related to the above.
12. For Ethereum-based rollups, it will look like they will solve network fees and congestion in the beginning, but before the year has come to an end, signs of problematic clogging will be visible again.
13. Data Availability (DA) will be the big theme in 2022. Chains that specialize in DA will get traction. Some roll-ups will choose to bridge to Ethereum, but use other solutions as the DA layer.
14. The Rainbow model (created by Eric Wall) for Bitcoin will stay intact. (And I mean actually stay intact, not stay intact because I make up new numbers).
15. We will have the technology ready for low-fee payments in highly private dollar synthetics with some amount of decentralization and censorship resistance to them. But they won’t yet become very commonplace in darknet markets in 2022.
Question: Do you think ETH2 will merge and will it be successful?
16. Yes, the merge will happen and it will be successful. There may be some resistance from PoW (Proof-of-Work) miners, but any remaining PoW chain split of Ethereum will swiftly fall into irrelevance. No catastrophic attacks on ETH2 PoS (Proof-of-Stake) will occur.
Institutions kickstarting the Micro Strategy narrative again
17. There will be no new Bitcoin soft fork upgrade in 2022.
18. There will be new signs of institutional Bitcoin adoption. A very large pension fund investment or something along those lines, something that kickstarts the Micro Strategy narrative again, which mostly fizzled out in 2021.
19. OHM (the native token of Olympus DAO) fails.
20. I would like to say ”2022 is the year of the Coordicide” but probably better to not get your hopes up. 30 percent chance it happens near the end of the year, more likely in 2023.
21. AVAX will join the top 10. ADA will drop out of it.
22. Richard Heart forks Binance Smart Chain (BSC). It will have a $100 billion market cap but be placed at spot #202 on CoinMarketCap.
XRP will never reach the top 3 again
Question: Any Hedera 2022 predictions?
23. DeFi won’t happen there (on Hedera). And outside of DeFi, Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and/or smart contract platforms have no real use case.
Question: What about the Cosmos network?
24. ATOM (#30 by market cap) overtakes Litecoin LTC (#19 by market cap).
Question: Your thoughts on NEAR Protocol
25. NEAR is great but nothing will happen on it
Question: Will XRP be in the top 3 again?
26. This will never happen again.
Question: Extended multi-year bear market, or narrative-driven turn-based supercycle (where ultimately quality only prevails)?
27. Something in between. No mega bear market, no supercycle.
