Analysts at Crypto.com have outlined the top 10 outcomes for 2021 and given a number of predictions for 2022.
Crypto.com published an analytical report with the 10 main outcomes of the past year:
- Elon Musk is the leading crypto influencer. His tweets strongly affected BTC prices at least three times.
- NFT Mania. According to NonFungible, the annual volume of the NFT market exceeded $13,7 billion (based on the current data at the moment of publication). For comparison, in 2020 this figure was a little over $67 million.
- Meme cryptocurrencies in the spotlight. The overall market cap has topped $45 billion. The largest meme-based coins are Dogecoin (DOGE), Shiba Inu (SHIB), Dogelon Mars (ELON), Samoyedcoin (SAMO) and Akita Inu (AKITA).
- Blockchain interoperability. Apart from the development of Ethereum, we also saw the active growth of Solana, Avalanche, Terra and Fantom in 2021. The total capitalization has surged over 500% since the beginning of January. Much of their growth was provided by cross-chain projects, the biggest of which are BSC, Polygon, Arbitrum and Optimism.
- The adoption of BTC as the official cryptocurrency in El Salvador, as well as plans to build a Bitcoin city and issue bitcoin-backed government bonds.
- China’s CBDC project. In October, the volume of transactions in the digital yuan network (eCNY) was approximately 62 billion CNY (~$9,7 billion). Over 140 million people have opened wallets, and payments were accepted by more than 1,55 million merchants from various spheres of the economy.
- Regulatory and taxation framework forming. Significant changes in crypto regulation have taken place in the U.S., China, UAE, Denmark, Singapore and other countries.
- Ethereum EIP-1559 and Bitcoin Taproot updates. The EIP-1559 update is part of the transition to Ethereum 2.0. It changes the fee mechanism and involves burning a portion of the commissions. The adoption of the Taproot technology into the Bitcoin system has been discussed since 2017. It makes transactions more confidential and secure, as well as reduces their size.
- From DeFi 1.0 to DeFi 2.0. Second-generation platforms involve new financial tools, closer communication between users, and self-governance principles.
- The Metaverse. Facebook’s rebranding to Meta has drawn active attention to the metaverse sector. The most significant projects in this area are Axie Infinity (AXS), Decentraland (MANA), The Sandbox (SAND), Enjin Coin (ENJ) and Illuvium (ILV). Their combined capitalization has already surpassed $28 billion.
The Top 5 Predictions for 2022:
- More than 1 billion crypto users by the end of 2022.
- Cryptocurrencies will become a major asset in traditional investment portfolios.
- GameFi will influence crypto adoption by the public.
- The use of cross-chain protocols will be commonplace.
- Through DAOs, cryptocurrencies will change traditional enterprise management models.
