Baseline Co-Founder Says Crypto Is 'Pre-CompuServe' an Still in Its Early Days

ConsenSys developer and Baseline Protocol co-founder, John Wolpert, has predicted that we may still be decades away from seeing wholesale mainstream adoption of crypto assets and distributed ledger technologies.

“My personal point of view is that these things tend to run in 20-year cycles,” Wolpert told Cointelegraph.

“Everybody who's running companies today needs to retire. And the new people need to show up. We saw that with mobile.”

Crypto compared to pre-1980’s internet

Wolpert compared the trajectory of cryptocurrency to the development of the internet from its conception in 1969, contradicting persistent analogies between Bitcoin and the internet of the early 1990s.

The ConsenSys developer predicted that we are still 15–20 years away from blockchain becoming embedded in daily life, stating:

“That's when we're gonna see [that] I can tip my seamstress in Guatemala for the great stitching on my shirt without that tip getting absorbed or garnished by her boss. I'd love to see that — fifteen years, probably twenty.”

“Even if you plot a one-to-one relationship year-to-year between blockchain adoption the way the internet proliferated, we're pre-CompuServe right now.”

Deutsche Bank predicts 200 million crypto users in 2030

Earlier this year, multinational investment bank Deutsche Bank AG published a report similarly likening the development of crypto to the early internet.

However, the paper notes that the internet had attracted 500 million users after existing for eight years while crypto has garnered 50 million users over the same amount of time. 

Deutsche Bank predicts that crypto assets will continue to grow at a rate equal to 10% of the internet’s trajectory, estimating that the crypto community will span 200 million users in 2030.