Our perception of money has changed dramatically over the past ten years. With technologies like Venmo, Paypal, peer-to-peer payment solutions, Apple Pay, online banking, Bitcoins etc. Physical cash is becoming rarer all the time.

Cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoins, have been on a rollercoaster ride for the last few years. After a spike in valuation and hype at the end of 2018, the value of Bitcoins fell to 25% within a year. Most people lost interest and confidence in cryptocurrencies and focused instead on the core technology behind them: Blockchain.

Bitcoin’s potential to change the whole concept of money by dematerialization, deregulation, and decentralization is still intact. To see its true value, however, we need to focus on possibilities and use cases instead of on the actual valuation of the cryptocurrency.

One solution is a series of stablecoins: a decentralized cryptocurrency pegged to other existing currencies to remove volatility. One promising example is Dai, partly developed in Denmark.

But the most interesting launch happening in 2020 is the new stable cryptocurrency called Libra. It is backed by a consortium of 20 partners like Vodaphone, Uber, Spotify and Facebook. Recent mistrust of Facebook in terms of data handling has been problematic for the project with prominent early partners like PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, eBay and Stripe choosing to exit. The verdict is currently out as to whether the project will ever be launched. The US Congress is extremely sceptical. The CEO of JP Morgan has said: “No, it will never fly”.

I, however, predict that it will launch in 2020 with a much broader backing than we see now. The advantages for the 1.7 billion unbanked people in the world and the possibilities for the 2.5 billion Facebook users are just too big to stop the project. So, look forward to a cryptocurrency comeback in 2020.