It was a tough year for cryptocurrencies. Over the past 12 months, Bitcoin – the most popular cryptocurrency – lost more than 70% of its market capitalization and Ethereum lost more than 80% of its value, according to digital currency exchange Coinbase.

Bitcoin, specifically, which was trading at almost $20,000 at the beginning of the year, dropped to as low as $3,000 in February and has been trading well under $4,000 all of December.

Indeed, 2018 wasn’t a great year for Bitcoin. And the near-term outlook doesn’t look much better.

The annual value of Bitcoin transactions, according to Juniper Research projections, will continue to decline in 2019. The report predicts that the drop in transaction volume and value in 2018 will carry on into 2019. For this year,  that daily transaction volumes dropped from an average of around 360,000 per day in late 2017 to 230,000 this September. And the daily transaction value also dropped to $670 million during that period, down from $3.7 billion.

Among the major factors depressing the digital currency are still-unresolved security issues and gaps in global cryptocurrency regulation.

South Korea, Japan, and other countries banned cryptocurrency trading due to multibillion-dollar scams and breaches. Even social media company Facebook and Google banned cryptocurrency and Initial Coin Offering ads on their sites earlier this year, although, in June, Facebook reversed that ban.

The Securities and Exchange Commission chair Jay Clayton in February, while saying he was “cautiously optimistic” about the prospects of wealth creation for the overall economy brought on by cryptocurrency, pointed to two major problems associated with Initial Coin Offerings and cryptocurrency: lack of sufficient oversight and illegal ICOs. Earlier this year, the SEC settled a pair of cases with companies it said failed to register their ICOs in accordance with federal securities laws.  

Also See: Does it Matter if Cryptocurrencies Are Securities? 

In November, Kelly Loeffler, CEO of Bitcoin futures trading platform company Bakkt, touched on similar concern at the CoinDesk’s Consensus: Invest conference in New York last month, where she said that one way to salvage cryptocurrency is by equipping the crypto-world with the right infrastructure, in other words, institutional security around crypto trading.

However, if cryptocurrency companies can overcome the security and regulatory hurdles they face, the digital currency may again gain momentum. One catalyst for that momentum is if more institutional companies such as established FIs and investors start getting involved in the cryptocurrency world either by creating their own products or putting their investment behind existing cryptocurrency endeavors.

Already, some institutions have started to do this. In October, for example, Fidelity set up Fidelity Digital Assets, a cryptocurrency trading platform for institutional investors. But these cases are far and few.

As for now, Bitcoin is trading at $3,770.01 at midday on Monday, down 1.3%, according to Coinbase.