Tl;Dr I got native blockchain tokens mostly right and the tokens mostly wrong, some of them badly so. Investors seem to be rightly more bullish about the former because they have a potentially much broader reach if they succeed.

In June, I wrote an article attempting to predict the prices of a bunch of crypto assets a month later. However, in July, I did not right a post scriptum because there was a period of volatility that would make it seem pointless. It is interesting, however, to see the longer-term fate of my predictions as of today.

Let us first list the predictions, confidence levels, and the rounded current values (as of around 2–30 pm on September 8, 2017) according to coinmarketcap.com:

BTC: $3000, 60% - $4631

ETH: $300, 80% - $330

DASH: $200, 60% - $345

ZEC: $300, 80% - $244

GNT: $2, 90% - $0.45

REP: $50, 80% - $24

AMP: $2, 80% - $0.20

TRST: $0.70, 60% - $0.28

SWT: $20, 70% - $1.98

The biggest, unambiguos forecast fails are SWT and AMP. Partly, it is probably mea culpa as I was probably motivated, as an investor, to exaggerate their prospects. Hence, if I ever make forecasts again, to confront this bias, I will significantly discount the confidence levels for assets I’m substantially invested in.

However, there is a serious reason why I was overoptimistic about them that is not related to bias. My thinking went as follows. The blockchain space is lacking projects apart from blockchains themselves that are immediately usable for ordinary people for important needs. Swarm City and Synereo were on the verge of releasing usable products of relative simplicity, hence I thought their arrival would give a lot of inspiration to the investors.

One of the standard explanations of why the fortunes of SWT and AMP did not improve with the beta launches can be summed up by the popular adage ‘buy the rumour — sell the news’. However, this implies that markets are irrational, and the investors systematically have expectations that are too high. It is certainly a tempting explanation when your forecasts go sour, however, it is a self-serving one, too.

Rather, I think the investors who weren’t really inspired were shown to be correct because so far there has been no significant adoption for either Synereo or Swarm City. When investors responded negatively to the initial products, they probably thought that they weren’t compelling enough. Especially given that while the functioning of the Swarm City and Synereo’s software is relatively straightforward compared to more complex stuff like, say, WeTrust that require a significant changes in behavior, their adoption is still a venture into something genuinely new for most people.

In the case of GNT and REP, my bets turned out to be way off, too, but those bets were conditional on the relevant software being released in beta (although I should have stated it more explicitly). The releases in question haven’t happened, yet, so we’ll need to reserve judgment for later.

On the other hand, I got the native blockchain token price predictions broadly right. One reason was that, as I expected, there were no groundbreaking changes to their functioning, even though the Bitcoin Cash hardfork took place. Secondly, the fact that the high price levels achieved by several blockchain native tokens by June were retained or even improved upon suggests that the investors are relatively more bullish about blockchain platforms compared to individual projects, even of Golem’s stature. And this, despite the fact that they are still relatively lightly used, especially Dash, ZCash and the resurgent Litecoin for which I did not give a forecast. This is probably due to the fact that the potential gains for a blockchain platform of winning a large chunk of mainstream users in the future are so high that they tend to dwarf the allure of narrower projects. Especially given their more pronounced network effects.

The key takeaway is that it is really, really difficult to forecast things in the blockchain space, as I anticipated when I wrote that the initial article was merely an educational exercise. The second one is that it is probably not a good idea to become too attached to particular projects, especially relatively narrow ones, even though the other extreme of trying to catch any rapidly rising coin and then selling at the peak is probably not a good idea, either.