- 2021 was a wild year for crypto; its value rose from under $ 800 billion to $ 2.3 trillion.
- Experts expect increasing acceptance of crypto and a decoupling between Bitcoin and Altcoins in 2022.
- Insider has their price predictions, altcoin recommendations, and key trends on their radar.
According to all indications, 2021 was a wild year for cryptocurrencies, whose total market value rose from just under $ 800 billion at the beginning of the year to $ 2.3 trillion.
Driven by growing institutional adoption, Bitcoin hit a new all-time high of nearly $ 69,000 when companies like MicroStrategy, Tesla, and Block (formerly Square) added the digital currency to their balance sheets. El Salvador was the first country to adopt Bitcoin as a legal currency alongside the US dollar, and it attracted the interest of other nations to follow the same path.
Celebrities, star athletes, and even the mayors of Miami and New York chose to take some, if not all, of their salary in Bitcoin.
But 2021 wasn’t just about Bitcoin. Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency, also rose to a new all-time high of nearly $ 4,900, driven by the explosive growth of decentralized finance, non-fungible tokens, and metaverse-related activity on the network.
This was a year with record-breaking milestones for the industry. In March, an NFT artwork by digital artist Beeple sold for over $ 69 million. In April, Coinbase became the first US-based crypto exchange to be publicly listed on the Nasdaq exchange. In May, the crypto market wavered after Tesla CEO Elon Musk stopped accepting Bitcoin as a payment method, citing the enormous amount of energy required to mine Bitcoin. Along the way, meme coins, including Musk’s favorite Dogecoin and rival Shiba-Inu coin, exploded in popularity.
Over the summer, Layer-One protocols like Solana, Avalanche, and Algorand jumped into the battle for the fastest, most affordable, and most scalable platform for developers. Metaverse-linked Decentraland and the Sandbox gained widespread recognition overnight after Facebook decided to rename it “Meta”. Enthusiastic about the abundance of opportunities in crypto land, venture capital investors poured a record $ 30 billion into blockchain companies eager to usher in the so-called Web 3.0 era.
Of course, greater visibility goes hand in hand with greater responsibilities. The crypto industry still has many serious problems to solve in the coming year. In 2021, scammers stole $ 7.7 billion worth of cryptocurrencies from victims, 81% more than the previous year, according to Chainalysis. Meanwhile, controversy over whether some dollar-pegged stablecoins are fully backed by their dollar reserves has gotten the industry into hot water with US regulators.
While talks of an impending crypto winter have surfaced lately, analysts, investors and industry executives expect continued mainstreaming of crypto in 2022 as stadiums get renamed after crypto companies and NFTs continue to mesh with pop culture.
Insider spoke to nine of them and compiled their predictions below.
James Faris, Kari McMahon, and George Glover contributed to this story.
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