Alongside the birth of decentralized projects has come decentralized teams. It’s an interesting and perhaps unexpected trend that the technology has helped foster. In fact, our team at Moon Assist embodies this ethos and is spread across multiple continents.

Are any mainstream outlets covering this trend? As decentralized projects and teams mature, what are the potential implications for decentralized teams at scale?

Has anyone tried AirSwap. It's a newly launched DEX that uses atomic swaps.

Exactly. There's demand that's sitting on the sidelines right now. The timing of that demand entering the markets should partly coincide with the shift from the bear market we're in to the next bull run. It's only been a few months of this current bear market, though.

Agreed. At Moon Assist, we believe managing your portfolio requires seamless trading as well. With the ability to access many exchanges through a single platform, portfolio management becomes a feature, albeit a key one, for crypto investors rather than its own fragmented application.

If you're interested, you can sign up at moonassist.com for early access.

If something like Blockstack takes off because people want a decentralized internet, then all apps on top of the Blockstack browser will be decentralized. You don't need to make the case for the decentralization of one specific application, just the need for this shift at the internet protocol layer more generally.

Institutional money moving into crypto is not at odds with the idea of cryptocurrencies. If bitcoin matures to a point where it can compete with or replace fiat currencies, then institutions will choose to participate in this new financial system.

I agree with your first point that there are no significant signs of institutional money in crypto markets, yet. But I'm not sure you can extrapolate out the level of interest from these investors. The lack of infrastructure hasn't allowed us the opportunity to see how institutional investors react when given the chance to enter the markets. With upcoming custody solutions and some time, we'll find out.

I think the argument that the decentralized portfolio apps use is that they are designed to not aggregate and collect data on their users' crypto portfolios. Privacy and security around portfolio apps should clearly be a priority. Whether that requires decentralization, however, is up for debate.

There seems to be an endless number of portfolio management options today with Blockfolio, CoinTracking, and Delta being some of the more popular choices.

Alongside these early centralized portfolio management platforms, there’s a number of decentralized options available too. Blockstack has listed at least a dozen portfolio Dapps now.

How will this market play out? Will decentralized portfolio management become more popular over time? Or will portfolio management become commoditized by platforms that offer other features outside of just tracking?

Huh, this would certainly surprise me. In fact, I think a handful of governments may already be quietly accumulating...

As institutional sentiment shifts towards embracing this new asset class and custody solutions for institutions mean they are able to substantially enter the market, I think we will finally start to see institutions participate in the real action. Kingdom Trust, which has $12 billion in custody and is building out crypto custody solutions for institutions, was recently acquired by BitGo. That should be a signal of what's to come...

Thanks for sharing that link.

It's a good point that historically the market rose in unison. As the market matures, this pattern will break. And many of those lower quality projects that raised money in the bull market are hurting from this bear market and still without products released...

Regardless of what effect institutional volume has had on bitcoin's value up until this point, much of that money that was expected to flood the markets has yet to do so. Endowments, pension funds, etc are not yet in bitcoin at scale and that, in part, is due to a lack of institutional infrastructure. It sounds like that infrastructure is coming, though. And it also sounds like the institutional guys are now interested in a bit of exposure to the crypto markets.

What’s the best way to compare cryptocurrency valuations? Using denominations in BTC or USD alone doesn’t account for differences in supply.
Is normalizing the supply against BTC market cap a better way to compare prices? Coinmarketcap doesn’t have this feature but OnChainFX does.

Are there other good ways to think about this?

They are certainly whales across bitcoin and other coins. But bitcoin whales are a different beast, they are the biggest and earliest adopters in the most mature market. Their intentions will likely be different than whales in less certain crypto markets.

Interestingly, a recent FT article suggests that the current bitcoin price has absorbed liquidations of Mt Gox trustee and Fortress, worth hundreds of millions, in the last quarter.

Whales certainly still have power, but BTC is seeming more mature than people give it credit for if it can handle these large sell-offs.

Yes, they will be relatively late to get into the uncertain crypto markets. That time may be coming soon, however. Investment firms are reportedly getting requests from endowments and pension funds about how to get exposure to these markets and the custody infrastructure is now being established to allow for these institutional investors to take positions.

Even relatively small positions by institutional standards could be significant for young crypto markets. Any exposure to these markets is risky by institutional terms. So it's probably safe to assume that initial investments would be concentrated around the very highest market cap coins - BTC, ETH, LTC, BCH.

You're right that more products and less scams are needed and will likely be the force that carries the markets.

It's also possible that endowments, pensions, etc haven't entered the markets yet and will be doing so later this year. What effect, if any, that has on the markets is unclear.

The bitcoin market may be more mature than its size implies. Investors like Ari Paul of BlockTower seem to think so, which raises an interesting point - how do you measure market maturity?

This seems to be a key difference between crypto markets and stock markets. Whales inherently exist in both, but the incentives change in crypto as they are independent actors and not governments or financial institutions.