What Was Crypto’s Biggest 2024 Story? Hint: It Wasn’t Named Elon

For once in its recent history, the cryptocurrency sector is likely ending the year on a high.

Bitcoin, despite dropping below the $100,000 mark as of reporting, is up over 110% for the year having hit a successive series of all-time highs. Institutional adoption of digital asset solutions is growing as the regulatory and political landscape softens. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is getting a new chief who could put to bed many old legal issues lingering over the domestic landscape. Stablecoins are emerging as a potent payments tool for enterprise businesses.

Ultimately, 2024 marked a pivotal moment for the crypto and blockchain industry, with shifts in technology, regulation and market sentiment. As the sector matured, it experienced transformative changes that bridged gaps between the speculative origins of cryptocurrency and its increasingly utilitarian applications across industries.

This holiday season, for example, moviegoers across the United States will be able to pay for ticket and concession purchases at Regal theaters with the USDC stablecoin.

Beyond cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology found new champions in 2024. Enterprises increasingly adopted blockchain to enhance supply chain transparency, streamline payments and improve data security. Financial institutions also embraced blockchain innovations and increasingly investigated the benefits of tokenizing real-world assets.

As the promise of more regulatory clarity spurred institutional adoption of blockchain-based innovations across finance, payments and commerce, 2024 emerged as a year where blockchain technology narrowed the gap with retail investors’ crypto speculation.

Read more: Why Banks Might Want to Have a Blockchain Strategy

Regulatory Clarity Can Help Unlock Blockchain Utility

For years, the crypto industry operated in regulatory gray zones, stymying mainstream adoption and sowing uncertainty among institutional players. In 2024, this began to change. Major jurisdictions, including the United States, the European Union and several Asian nations, introduced comprehensive frameworks that balanced innovation with consumer protection.

As PYMNTS has written, the need for clear regulatory frameworks remains one of the most pressing issues facing the crypto industry.

“The largest financial institutions are eager to explore tokenized assets,” Nikola Plecas, head of commercialization, Visa Crypto, told PYMNTS, but noted that they require regulatory certainty to do so at scale.

Echoing that sentiment, Tony McLaughlin, emerging payments at Citi Services, told PYMNTS: “In five years, we might have a blockchain or state-machine capability where financial institutions involved in a transaction can look at that common state and use it as a source of truth to update their own balance sheets.”

PYMNTS Intelligence this year found that blockchain technology has numerous potential benefits to serve the unique needs of regulated industries, including finance, healthcare, identity verification and supply chain management, to name a few.

“Don’t wait. Start experimenting with blockchain-based payments now, or risk losing out to more agile competitors,” Ran Goldi, senior vice president, payments and network at Fireblocks, told PYMNTS.

Read more: Visa, PayPal and Others Could Bring Utility and Legitimacy to Stablecoins

The Rise of Stablecoins Is Becoming Impossible to Ignore

Stablecoins continued their ascent as the backbone of cross-border and enterprise crypto payments and a bridge to traditional finance. PYMNTS covered what payments and finance professionals need to know about the unique, fiat-pegged assets.

Cross-border payments, historically plagued by high fees and slow transaction times, underwent a significant transformation in 2024. Blockchain technology emerged as a key enabler, offering transparency, speed and cost efficiency. Stablecoins played a crucial role, allowing businesses to bypass traditional correspondent banking networks and settle transactions almost instantaneously.

“Blockchain technology and public blockchains in particular, are opening up a number of new use cases, one of which is to transfer value — such as remittances — from one country to another,” Raj Dhamodharan, executive vice president, blockchain and digital assets at Mastercard, told PYMNTS.

PYMNTS Intelligence has found that using cryptocurrencies for cross-border payments could be the winning use case that the sector has been looking for. The research revealed that blockchain-based cross-border solutions, particularly stablecoins, are being increasingly embraced by firms looking to find a better way to transact and expand internationally.

“Blockchain solutions and stablecoins — I don’t like to use the term crypto because this is more about FinTech — they’ve found product-market fit in cross-border payments,” Sheraz Shere, general manager of payments and commerce at Solana Foundation, told PYMNTS earlier this year. “You get the disintermediation, you get the speed, you get the transparency, you get extremely low cost.”

The changes of 2024 laid the groundwork for a more resilient and integrated crypto ecosystem. Regulatory clarity, technological advancements and growing institutional interest signaled that the industry was entering a new phase of maturity. However, achieving mainstream adoption will require continued innovation, collaboration and a commitment to addressing the challenges that remain.

As the dust settles on this transformative year, one thing is becoming clear: crypto and blockchain are no longer niche technologies.

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