Adoption of Financial Technologies (Fintech): The Case of Cryptocurrencies

This research is devoted to explain and forecast the adoption pattern of financial technologies on the example of cryptocurrencies. The introduction of the first cryptocurrency Bitcoin in 2009 raised a number of questions concerning the future of virtual currencies, their impact on traditional financial sector and potential rate of adoption. To the best of our knowledge, this Master’s thesis proposes the first quantitative model for adoption of cryptocurrencies. Based on the review of adoption models and prior empirical findings, we propose a multistage empirical model to forecast the rate of adoption and describe the pattern of technology acceptance. We propose three scenarios of the future development of cryptocurrencies and quantify them based in the data for Bitcoin. We find that, under scenario assumptions, the Bitcoin adoption will take around 20–30 years to reach the maximum market potential with estimated rate of adoption up to 0.3%.