Even though the crypto industry has a market cap of around $280 billion currently, numerous investors and a majority of the general public predict that virtual currencies will soon come to an end. While it is true the nascent industry is currently going through a major slump, as it was worth over $800 billion during its peak in last December, the influx of investment into it keeps on growing, with ICOs already raising more money this year than through the entirety of 2017.

The crypto boom has been likened to many historical speculative bubbles, such as the tulip mania of the 17th century, the 1929 stock crash that preceded the Great Depression and most often – the dotcom bubble. Yoni Assia, CEO of the eToro trading platform is the latest to use the dotcom analogy but in a different sense than what you might expect.

In an interview with Business Insider, Mr. Assia claimed that 95% of crypto projects will “end as nothing”. However, the ones that survive will shape our future and have a huge influence on a variety of industries as the blockchain technology is as revolutionary as the Internet was at the turn of the new millennium.

According to him, “You have something that you’ve never had before, not even in the dotcom bubble: if you have a genius idea now and you put a whitepaper on it and suddenly you have 100,000 millionaires reading it and saying ‘hmm, that’s a really good idea.’ If 1,000 put in $10,000 — which is not a lot of money for those 100,000 — you just raised $10 million for your ICO. That scale has never happened before.”

He also went on to add that, “Tesla made 2,000%, Facebook made 1,000%, Google made 1,000%. This is the same thing but earlier in the cycle. […]My long-term view is selling crypto now is like selling Apple in 2001. You do it if you have to do it, you don’t do it if you don’t have to do it.“

Apple has been a well-known but relatively unappreciated company during the first years of 2000s, as Microsoft dominated the market. Apple‘s stock price hovered around $1.50 during 2001 but with the introduction of iPods and iBooks, coupled with Mac OS improvement, it continued to gradually increase and skyrocketed in the last decade after the release of iPhone in 2007.

Apple stock prices have continued to breach all-time heights recently, as they are trading at around $189 at press time and the tech giant is on the way to becoming the first trillion dollar company.

Mr. Assia concluded by reaffirming the belief that blockchain technology has revolutionary potential, as it provides transparency and decentralization in industries of utmost importance, such as medicine, finance or electoral systems.

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