4: Charting the Unknown and Future Directions

In the preceding chapters, we have provided a history of the cryptomarket as a social institution, detailed the cryptomarket economy and the growing academic literature, outlined the methodological approaches of researchers within this domain, and discussed the ethical challenges with which they contend. In this concluding chapter, we proceed to give our best predictions, anchored in the existing research, as to how we conceive the immediate future of cryptomarkets. Some of these are, unavoidably, speculative. It is not our intention to define with complete certainty what will happen, but rather to offer some plausible scenarios and likely trends. The sections below are therefore intended to provide some conceptual grounding for future research into what we believe are important and underdeveloped research areas and are followed by a summary of our predictions and concluding remarks.