What to expect for Crypto in 2022
Cryptocurrency: From 2021 to 2022
2022 is here. The new year always comes with a promise of opportunity and change. So, what will 2022 look like for cryptocurrency?
It’s been only 13 years since crypto was born with the introduction of Bitcoin. Since then, over 300 million people around the globe have come to use crypto, approximately $112 billion is traded in cryptocurrency per day and Bitcoin is posted about on social media every 3 seconds. Cryptocurrencies are proven and here to stay.
2021 in particular has been a big year across the board for crypto: a blue-check titans like Bitcoin (BTC) has been worth more than $63,000 and has been adopted by countries as an official currency. Ethereum also enjoyed a new all-time-high, starting 2021 at $731 and hitting over $4,800 in November. These big players in the space were not the only ones to surge in 2021. Small players and newcomers routinely dominated the news cycles and exploded in value. The most famous examples are tokens like Shiba INU (SHIB), up over 52,000,000% for 2021 or Solana (SOL), which climbed up the ranks to become the fifth most popular coin.
As of the end of last year, there are about 13,000 different cryptocurrencies representing a total combined market cap of $2.37 trillion. These stats are impressive, especially when we consider that only approximately 8-10% of the US population trades cryptocurrency. That number has been rising and is one to look out for; crypto awareness leads to crypto adoption, meaning we can expect more big green candles this year.
But there’s an even more exciting reason why cryptocurrency’s future is so bright: new forms of utility are rapidly emerging. The foundations of the metaverse and the past year’s meteoric rise of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) present a massive new platform for cryptocurrencies to thrive. Crypto isn’t just an alternative to cash anymore- it can be a tool that enables and progresses Web 3.0. Crypto now allows you to deal in NFT purchases and deals and makes it possible to have property transactions in the metaverse.
We see pioneer examples of this in tokens like Axie Infinity (AXS) and The Sandbox (SAND). AXS is an Ethereum-based crypto used in the trading and battling NFT game Axie Infinity. This pay-to-earn game has over two million daily active users and was even reported as a main source of income for players in the Philippines during the 2021 pandemic lockdown. SAND powers The Sandbox Game, a community-driven platform where creators can monetize gaming experiences on the blockchain.
Crypto’s decentralized model has proven to be popular and innovative over the past 13 years, allowing currencies to grow and flourish each year. Now, with the rise of NFTs, the metaverse and their new utilities, crypto’s rise to the moon seems more and more inevitable.
