What To Expect In 2023

GM Readers!📪 It's BitDegree Insider, and welcome to the last newsletter of this tremendous year.

⭐️Today's selection:

• 🎆What To Expect In 2023?
• 🧩Answer To Yesterday's Quiz
• 👌Selected Meme of The Day
• 📰Bite-Sized News

WHAT TO EXPECT IN 2023?

2023 is almost here. Time to close this chapter, and begin a new one. And what's the best way to prepare for it? Some foreshadowing. Or, if life's a movie, let's call it a trailer.

A trailer for 2023 in web3. Here's what to expect, what's coming, what's fascinating, what lays ground for some new, refreshing hype. 

Time passes, things change, but there are some unstoppable forces and immovable objects that proudly resist the fleeting nature of this world.

We're talking about the big guys. Ethereum and Bitcoin.

Next year is when Ethereum will allow withdrawals from their Beacon chain. That's a fundamental update.

Unlocking withdrawals from the Beacon Chain will increase user participation in the protocol.

Thus, annual interest rates for ETH staking may increase (now they are about 4%).

This will boost the future development and growth of the Ethereum ecosystem.

Funds circulating in the Ethereum ecosystem will become more liquid. It will make it more accessible for new stakers to join the game, and boost the system's security, and scalability.

This event is called an Ethereum Shanghai Hard Fork, and it's scheduled for March 2023.

What about Bitcoin?

Fiji's newly elected Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka recently put forward a proposal to adopt the world's first cryptocurrency as a means of payment.

He also made it clear that legislation on crypto assets could be passed as early as 2023.

Fiji could become the next state after El Salvador where BTC will be the means of payment. And to one degree or another, we will continue to see more and more adaptation to BTC.

LAYER 2 TREND

In 2023 we'll see more and more Layer 2 solutions being implemented. Especially on Ethereum.

P.S. Blockchain technology is like a sandwich. It consists of layers: the base layer, or "layer 1", and the additional layers built on top of the base layer, or "layer 2" solutions.

So, in this case, Ethereum, is the base, layer 1, the toast on which the layer 2 butter is being spread on.

So, such layer 2 solutions as OPTIMISM, ARBITRUM, ZKSYNC, Polygon, or Aztec are among the most promising names in 2022.

Firstly, Arbitrum and ZkSynch create extra HYPE because they still haven't issued their tokens yet.

With the services and updates that these blockchains provide, they make Ethereum work more smoothly.

They remove the burden of executing various transactions from Ethereum, thus making it less overloaded.

But, Ethereum is a proud beast. Ethereum developers have promised that in 2023 they'll begin implementing the sharding technology. 

Ethereum sharding is a scalability solution for the Ethereum blockchain that allows the network to process transactions in parallel by dividing the blockchain into smaller parts called "shards".

Ethereum developers expect that this will increase blockchain throughput up to 100k transactions per second. This is good news... But it raises a question.

Will there be any need for Layer 2 blockchains? if Ethereum becomes very fast and cheap to use as it is... Will we need them?

The answer is yes!

Since even 100,000 per second will not be enough for mass blockchain adoption.

Even though VISA is a means of payment and has 25/30k transactions per second, it works fine for them because it only covers the area of payments.

And Ethereum, in addition to payments, covers games, meta-universes, and social networks. 

All of this will require millions of transactions per second (successful blockchain-based games will create a huge load of transactions, and this will require a strong, prepared architecture).

Therefore, Ethereum can be seen as a HUB, a core network on which many Level 2 blockchains will be anchored for their own security.

At the same time, small transactions will take place on specialized Layer2 blockchains like Arbitrum Nova, Polygon and dozens of others.

Thus, the need for Layer2 will only evolve and grow! In 2023, it will be a vast trend.

NEW BLOCKCHAINS

The blockchain galaxy will have new planets discovered in it. 

They're called... SUI, and SEI. (those are 2 completely different btw, don't mix them up).

Zetachain and LayerZero will say hello as well, but this one's tricky - these two chains will be mostly competing against each other.

And we'll even see a modular blockchain arrive. It's gonna be called Celestia.

Btw, a modular blockchain is when the three layers of blockchain (Consensus, Execution, Data Availability) can work separately from each other without any risks. Because of this, each layer can be optimized, solving the Blockchain trilemma with the potential to achieve unprecedented results. Now you know!

TODAY, 2023... AND BEYOND

2023 will also be the beginning of new things, new things that will continue growing for a long after that. We'll continue seeing brands embrace web3 and its possibilities.

Here are some examples:

Brandessence Market Research analysts estimate that the virtual real estate market will grow to $6.78 billion by 2026.

Bill Gates made this prediction that Zoom and Skype to be abandoned in favour of meta-universes by 2024.

According to Verified Market Research (VMR), the NFT market could grow to $231 billion by 2030. The market was estimated to be worth $11.3 billion last year.

So, 2023 is when everything begins, continues, grows, and surprises us.

CONCLUSIONS

OK. It's time to call it a day. Quite an amount of information over the last few days, wasn't it? Well, we're done, it's going to be less intense in 2023. Or at least we hope so.

In 2023 we'll see more regulations. This will affect token trend sales. We'll face new bumps, hacks and bankruptcies. We will have to remain vigilant and careful.

But there are reasons for the optimistic scenario.

Central banks will stop raising interest rates next year.

In the US, inflation is starting to slow down and the Fed's recent statements are not as pessimistic as the market initially predicted.

Either way, stay tuned. Don't miss out on any important news. 

Let's end this year with a poll. 

ANSWER TO YESTERDAY'S QUIZ 

Let's end this year with answers, instead of questions.

Yesterday we asked you to count the hidden BitDegree logos on our Christmas card. And we said that the watermark doesn't count. And having said that...

The right answer is 9! (the most camouflaged one was hidden on the deer's nose, so if you counted only 8, it's alright, you're still the winner!

SELECTED MEME OF THE DAY

BITE-SIZED NEWS

• Judge Kaplan Considers Moving Robinhood Shares to a Neutral Broker. Robin Hood was on the right side, not the neutral side tho.
• The Central Bank of Turkey Completed the First Set of Tests for its CBDC. Centralized decentralization infentisfies.
• BMW Collaborates with CoinWeb to Roll Out Blockchain Loyalty Programme. In this case 'BMW' could stand for 'Blockchain's Magical Wonders'.