CoinGecko COO Bobby Ong sat down for a chat at the Token2049 conference.
Speaking at Token2049, CoinGecko COO and co-founder Bobby Ong offered his thoughts on the future of crypto and how crypto adoption fared in 2021.
Token2049, a forward-thinking crypto conference that attracts the likes of Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum co-founder, and FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, chose the brains of Bobby Ong, one of the co-founders of crypto data aggregator CoinGecko, on September 29, 2022.
Ong’s Views on the Matter
With a bird’s-eye view of trading volumes, prices, and exchanges, Ong assessed where he sees the crypto markets going in the next five to ten years.
“We will see millions of tokens, both fungible and non-fungible tokens. Blockchain is eating the world,” said Ong, borrowing a famous mantra, “software is eating the world,” from a16z venture fund Marc Andreessen.
In the long term, Ong says that cryptocurrencies will have their Airbnb and Uber moments to catalyze mass adoption, ushering in tens or hundreds of millions of users.
Simply put, just follow the money. And the money will be in decentralized finance and NFTs, considering the recent capital investment in the space.
According to Ong, it will be a successful GameFi app that will catalyze mass adoption. GameFi is a niche in the DeFi ecosystem that brings monetization frameworks to Blockchain-based games and often incorporates NFT elements.
“Ninety-nine of them will fail. But maybe just one, and all we need is just one. Like the PUBG of cryptocurrencies, for example, or the Fortnite of cryptocurrencies, everyone plays it.”
Ong founded Coingecko with CEO TM Lee in 2014 to “democratize access to crypto data and empower users with actionable insights,” according to the company website.
Where will the new adoption come from?
According to Ong, future crypto adoption will likely come from countries with weak currencies such as Turkey, Vietnam, and Venezuela.
“People work hard to save, but they have no way to store their wealth safely. And they’re looking for a way to have an intertemporal store of value. And they store value through cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum, or just pure stablecoins like DAI, USDC, USDT instead of holding the national currency,” observes Ong.
And the data seems to support Ong’s theory. In 2021, CoinGecko saw an increase in traffic to the Axie Infinity SLP token page, coming from players in countries like the Philippines. These players turned to playing Axie Infinity to earn more than “$1 or $2” a day, Ong said.
Ong gives his opinion on the personal investment strategy
According to Ong, the increased institutional adoption of cryptocurrencies has led them to take on the properties of a risky asset like tech stocks, a trend that is unlikely to stop during this current bear market cycle.
As for his personal investment strategy, Ong believes in the long game. “So I’m definitely a bag holder,” he joked. You have spent most of the bear market researching rather than investing.
He advises investing 1-10% of an investment portfolio in Bitcoin and Ether, over five to ten years, to beat the current five-year market cycle. If crypto goes up, that number could go to 30% or 40%, but keep in mind that crypto is risky and it could drop to zero.
“And I tell people, if you can’t sleep at night and you keep thinking about your crypto holdings and your crypto portfolio, you probably have too much exposure,” he said.
By Audy Castaneda
