Over the medium-to-long term, she remains "very bullish" because of the capital and talent that continue to flow into the industry. "So people get ahead of themselves, people get greedy, and then people get scared when things break."
"It is a free market but it is also a market that is driven by human behavior and human behavior is not rational at all," she told Insider. With crypto being an emotionally charged market, it is hard to see where the price could go in 2022. Whether it is through developers building decentralized applications on top of smart contract platforms or artists engaging with NFTs, the crypto industry has enabled a vibrant creator economy over the past year.įang said bitcoin is unlikely to hit $100,000 by year-end as she had expected under certain scenarios. James Faris, Kari McMahon, and George Glover contributed to this story.įor Fang, 2021 has been a year for builders, and that is a bullish indicator for the year ahead, in her view. Insider spoke to nine of them and compiled their predictions below. While talks of an impending crypto winter have surfaced recently, analysts, investors, and industry executives are expecting to see the continued mainstreaming of crypto in 2022 as stadiums get renamed after crypto companies and NFTs continue to mesh with pop culture. Meanwhile, controversies around whether some US dollar-pegged stablecoins are fully backed by their dollar reserves have landed the industry in hot water with US regulators. In 2021, scammers pilfered $7.7 billion worth of cryptocurrency from victims, up 81% from the year before, according to Chainalysis. The crypto industry still has plenty of serious issues to address in the year ahead. Of course, with greater visibility comes greater responsibilities.
Metaverse-linked Decentraland and the sandbox achieved widespread recognition overnight after Facebook decided to rebrand as "Meta." Enthralled by the bonanza of opportunities in crypto land, venture capital investors poured a record $30 billion into blockchain companies that are eager to usher in the so-called Web 3.0 era. Over the summer, layer-one protocols such as solana, avalanche, and algorand jumped into the fray of competing to be the fastest, lowest-cost, and most scalable platform for developers. Along the way, meme coins including Musk's favorite dogecoin and rival shiba inu coin exploded in popularity. In May, the crypto market whipsawed after Tesla CEO Elon Musk stopped accepting bitcoin as a payment method, citing the massive amount of energy spent in bitcoin mining. In April, Coinbase became the first US-based crypto exchange to publicly list on the Nasdaq exchange.
In March, an NFT artwork by digital artist Beeple sold for over $69 million.
Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency, also soared to a new all-time high of almost $4,900 driven by explosive growth in decentralized finance, non-fungible tokens, and metaverse-related activities on the network.įor the industry, this has been a year of record-breaking milestones. El Salvador became the first country to adopt bitcoin as legal currency, alongside the US dollar, drawing interests from other nations to pursue the same path.Ĭelebrities, star athletes, and even the mayors of Miami and New York opted to take some, if not all, of their salary in bitcoin.īut 2021 hasn't been just about bitcoin. By all indications, 2021 has been a wild year for cryptocurrencies, which have seen their total market value surge to $2.3 trillion from just under $800 billion at the start of the year.įueled by growing institutional adoption, bitcoin reached a new all-time high of nearly $69,000 as companies including MicroStrategy, Tesla, and Block (formerly Square) added the digital currency to their balance sheets.