For blockchain, the second phase started in 2014 with Ethereum and reached its peak in 2017 with the market mania surrounding ICOs. The second phase blockchain encountered was the peak of inflated expectations, where early publicity produced a number of success stories accompanied by an almost equally high number of failures. The following couple of years were market by price volatility and low adoption. This was the case with Bitcoin, which remained essentially worthless until 2010, when the first BTC trading platforms emerged from the BitcoinTalk Forum. While extremely exciting to the small population involved in the niche technology, the first phase of the cycle often produces no usable products and has no proven commercial viability. It led to the creation of other cryptocurrencies and ideas about additional implementation for blockchain. The innovation trigger for blockchain technology was the Bitcoin whitepaper, a single event that started a ripple effect of breakthroughs. The equally fast growth crypto media has seen in the meantime has convinced many that a single article can be as big of a market mover as a major financial recession.Īnd while the crypto community has been embroiled in a decade-long discussion with the mainstream about the viability of cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology has been on a low-profile journey almost all emerging technologies have gone through. The massive ups and downs cryptocurrency prices have seen in the past decade did little to convince the general public that it was seeing a rise of a new monetary system and not a get-rich-quick Ponzi scheme. Since the first Bitcoin block was mined in January 2009, the cryptocurrency industry has been on what can only be described as a wild ride. If applied correctly to new technology or application, Hype Cycles can help investors get a better understanding of where the technology stands and evaluate the risks involved with investing in a certain period of time.īut, what does an often-disputed metric usually applied to the dot-com bubble in the late nineties have to do with the crypto industry? And how can it be used to quantify the adoption of blockchain, a technology that continuously fails to resemble anything we’ve seen in the market so far? Crypto bull runs show an almost perfect correlation to Gartner’s Hype Cycle Graph representing the Gartner Hype Cycle (Source: Gartner)Įvery Hype Cycle boils down a new technology’s life cycle to five key phases-the innovation trigger, the peak of inflated expectations, the trough of disillusionment, the slope of enlightenment, and the plateau of productivity. To help both investors and the public discern the hype from real value, American research and advisory company Gartner came up with its trademarked Hype Cycles-a representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications and their relevance to solving real business problems. And while publicity has often been one of the most important factors in technology adoption, it often clouded the public’s vision of what was actually commercially viable and sustainable in the long term. Since the early nineties and the beginning of the internet boom, each new technology has carried with itself a huge amount of hype. Quantifying bold promises from new technologies with the Hype Cycle With the Gartner Hype Cycle perfectly describing the ups and downs the dot-com boom saw in the early 2000s, many have wondered whether applying the methodology to the crypto industry would provide more clarity as to where the market is heading. Developed by research company Gartner to represent the adoption of new media, hype cycles have been used since the 1990s to quantify and predict the performance of groundbreaking new technologies.