Crypto markets are down but three upcoming events could herald a revival. Are you brave enough to be greedy when others are fearful?

Bitcoin Halving

This is probably the single event that will drive cryptocurrency prices back into the green in 2020. Past trends indicated some pre-halving momentum and a massive bull run following it.

According to the countdown the halving is less than 150 days away now. It is currently scheduled for May 14, 2020.

Bitcoin prices surged following previous halvings in 2012 and 2016 and there is no strong reason to dispute the same thing happening next year.

Searches for ‘Bitcoin halving’ have increased massively in the past few weeks, and searches for the alternate spelling ‘Bitcoin halvening’ are back at 100, the highest level for the year.

If history rhymes then the move may come after the halving event and may be bigger than 2016 as the ICO market doesn’t look like stealing its thunder.

The halving does several mathematical and economic things to BTC. It reduces the block reward from 12.5 to 6.25 coins and will decrease inflation to 1.8%.

The stock to flow ratio will double after the event which analyst Plan B’s model suggests will be incredibly bullish for the price.

Stock-to-flow model predicts the long term trend, and greed & fear cause the actual bitcoin price to dance around this trend. #cointegration pic.twitter.com/k5oL7lCYqM — PlanB [Jan/3➞???? ] (@100trillionUSD) December 17, 2019

Bitcoin will be the driving force for crypto markets in 2020 as it was this year.

PlusToken Cryptocurrency Sales

It has been widely reported that the PlusToken Ponzi scheme may have been responsible for the crypto market decline in the latter half of this year.

Cryptocurrency research firm Chainalysis reported that the Chinese wallet scam may have accumulated over $3 billion worth of cryptocurrency.

Over the course of the year the scammers utilized mixers and OTC brokers to launder funds out of the scheme.

Those larger selloffs coincided with heavy BTC and crypto market dumps as noted by prominent market analyst Alex Krüger.

30%-40% of Plustoken selling activity preceded price increases, while the remainder preceded price drops. pic.twitter.com/n1JOMKJcXQ — Alex Krüger (@krugermacro) December 16, 2019

Once the ill-gotten funds have been liquidated, crypto markets may return to some kind of normalcy and begin to recover.

The Ethereum Factor

This year Bitcoin has been the driving force for crypto markets as its dominance topped 73% during the peak.

Ethereum may have its day in 2020 though as it slowly migrates to proof-of-stake and proves Eth 2.0 isn’t ‘vaporware’.

Other PoS crypto assets such as Tezos have performed extremely well this year as investors look for passive income opportunities.

ETH 2.0 may still be a couple of years away, at least according to Messari Research, but the migration to Beacon Chain, which is Phase 0 of Serenity, will happen in 2020.

This will provide the first staking opportunities on the Ethereum blockchain and major exchanges may offer ETH staking rewards as they do with other tokens.

Add to that a rapidly growing DeFi market driven by Ethereum and it may too catalyze a recovery next year.