State Of Blockchain Report: Digital Assets Leave Equities, Gold, Property In The Dust

Bitcoin and blockchain media group CoinDesk has released its latest The State of Blockchain Report, which reveals digital assets are nearly twenty times more lucrative than property, gold and stocks combined.

The report reveals year-over-year returns on global real estate (3.2 percent), gold (7.7 percent), U.S. equities (9.2 percent), and global equities (14.7 percent) pale in comparison to returns on bitcoin (150.6 percent) and all digital assets (445 percent).

The 115-page report contains a breakdown of the historic surge in cryptocurrency across April, May, and June, including statistics on transaction numbers, fees, ICOs, token value propositions, enterprise adoption, research and development, regulation and industry challenges.

CoinDesk Director of Research Nolan Bauerle said: "This quarter's State of Blockchain Report is remarkably eye-opening. Blockchain and digital assets are already solving real-world problems in business, government, technology and finance, and the impact on markets has been extraordinary. At the end of Q1, the total cryptocurrency market cap was valued at $23 billion. Largely due to ICOs, the total market cap for digital assets hit $109 billion by the end of Q2."

While JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon recently called bitcoin "a fraud" and likened it to the Dutch tulip craze, the report told a different story. "The State of the Blockchain report dispels common myths and uncertainty surrounding blockchain through facts and exhaustive research from the top analysts in the space," said CoinDesk CEO Kevin Worth. "The statistics in the Q2 report speak for themselves; enterprise and institutions are taking this asset class seriously and investor confidence is climbing exponentially. In Q2 alone, blockchain token sales raised a combined $797 million, three times that of venture capital's $235 million investment in blockchain companies," Worth said.

In addition, the report shows records being smashed right, left and center: Q2 2017 saw the largest amount of combined blockchain transactions ever, at over half a million per day, while bitcoin's total market capitalization doubled. Global digital asset exchanges reported record trading volumes during the quarter, and returns for several ICO tokens since inception were historic, including Augur (4,583 percent returns), Golem (4,700 percent), ICONOMI (2,862 percent), Melonport (1,136 percent), First Blood (2,667 percent), Digix (2,393 percent) and SingularDTV (1,033 percent).

However, Q2 also saw some industry challenges. Due to Bitcoin's heavily publicized network congestion issues, transaction fees quadrupled from 62 cents in Q1 to $2.40 in Q2, while Ethereum's transaction fees rose by 918 percent within the same period. Further, in a blockchain sentiment survey, over 72 percent of the sample audience indicated bitcoin mining is too centralized, while 95 percent indicated ICO issuers should not convert funds raised into fiat currency.

"There will always be growing pains in an industry that added a billion dollars a day in value across Q2. Solutions are being worked on for blockchain backlogs, transaction capacities and reducing fees. The technology is advancing quickly and we are confident the industry will continue to boom. Regulation appears to be clearing up in Europe and Asia, while new guidelines are being instituted within the United States," said Bauerle.

In response to the unprecedented rise of cryptocurrency in Q2, CoinDesk is launching Consensus: Invest, an event tailored to the growing number of wealth managers interested in cryptocurrency.