The biggest themes for 2020 will be privacy, the rise of confidential stablecoins — especially algorithmic ones — DeFi and wider adoption.
We are still in the early adoption phase of crypto. When talking about cryptocurrency, it is hard to pinpoint a single topic that will be the most important with regard to its development. The important news to look for in 2020 will probably not be the big headlines, but will be the relatively small incremental changes, both technological and social in nature, that will increase trust, security and transparency but also bring an increased usability. On the technical side, some key factors could be reduced transaction times or higher limits on the number of transactions per second. On the social side, we might see a broader adoption by more retailers or an improvement of the image of crypto by being associated with legitimate uses instead of criminal usage like dark web payments or scams.