Well, it is 2022, Bitcoin is trading at $47,190 and Ethereum at $3,724. It has been a rough year for crypto investors with a lot of ups and downs and all that speculation. Although Bitcoin is 30% down from the all-time high in November, it's still been a good year for many investors I would say. It's because Bitcoin was at $29,000 on the first day of 2021.
It all started when Bitcoin penetrated through $20,000, the previous all-time-high which has been broken after three bearish years. And what not, there were never been these many dapps on Ethereum before. There were never been these many smart contract platforms which work.
Institutions' demand for Bitcoin grew as Tesla bought 1.5 billion dollars worth of Bitcoin. Microstrategy kept on buying the dips and as of today, Microstrategy holds 124,391 bitcoins purchased at an average price of $30,159. El Salvador made bitcoin their legal tender and set up a geo-thermal bitcoin mining center. A couple of Bitcoin ETFs were launched and are being traded on NASDAQ.
We have also seen many money-making opportunities in airdrops. Uniswap announced the first airdrop which was worth $800 when it was claimed but eventually it the airdrop was worth $12,000 at ATH. It's clearly life-changing money for some people. Then there was 1inch airdrop with was worth $6000 at some point. However, one of the biggest airdrops of the year was the DYDX airdrop. Some users who have traded more than $1M on the DYDX exchange, got an airdrop worth $190,000.
The recent airdrop $SOS, which rewarded Opensea users based on their ETH spending and transactions was also quite rewarding to early users. However, the majority of tokens are airdropped to wallets that are already rich. I have bought an NFT worth 0.07 ETH which got me just $10 worth of $SOS airdrop.
More platforms adopted this style of token distribution where they build an interactive community and reward the early users of the protocol. Plebs have also been hunting and making transactions on every protocol they can hands-on in hope of airdrops. Let's see how this goes with more and more decentralized protocols coming every day.
And there was an NFT boom, a lot of collections, PFPs, regenerative art, programmatically generated gaming NFTs were sold. NFT transaction volume skyrocketed. The first most popular NFTs in the crypto space, the Cryptopunks collection were the most traded NFTs in volume traded. Each Cryptopunk is being sold at $100,000,000. And the next most popular collection, Bored Ape Yacht Club, was bought by a lot of high-profile guys.
Enter Metaverse, Facebook renamed itself to Meta on the narrative of a virtual world. The already existing metaverses, the Decentraland, and the Sandbox had their coins renew all-time-highs. Metaverse projects gained traction. Metaverse economies started to build.
2021 was a great year for crypto. There has been a lot of development on Polygon, Fantom, Avalanche, Luna ecosystems. With L2 solutions attracting users with cheap transactions, TVL has built up. Arbitrum and Optimism networks have not announced their token yet and running ETH as their primary currency.
So here are the returns of the top ten cryptocurrencies in the last year. If you have put $1000 on any of these on Jan 1, 2021, as on Dec 31, 2021, you would have had
| Coin | Value on Dec 31,2021 | Return |
|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin | $1,596 | 59.6% |
| Ethereum | $4,990.9 | 399.09% |
| Binance Coin | $13,803.7 | 1280.37% |
| Tether | $1,000 | 0% |
| Solana | $113,901.3 | 11,290.13% |
| Cardano | $7,307.7 | 630.77% |
| USD Coin | $1000 | 0% |
| Ripple XRP | $3,818.2 | 281.82% |
| Terra | $131,321 | 13,032.1% |
| Polkadot | $2,922 | 192.2% |
Here are some more popular coins and their returns in 2021 if you have invested $1000 in each of them on Jan 1, 2021
| Coin | Value on Dec 31,2021 | Return |
|---|---|---|
| VeChain | $4,449.2 | 344.92% |
| Near | $11,143.88 | 1014% |
| Avalanche | $31,420.56 | 3042% |
| Doge | $36,170.2 | 3517.02% |
| Decentraland | $42,051.3 | 4105.13% |
| Fantom | $130,625 | 12963% |
| Polygon | $132,631 | 13163% |
| Sandbox | $156,315.79 | 15532% |
| Axie Infinity | $156,315.79 | 15532% |
| Shiba Inu | $440,519,480 | 44051848% |
So if you think Dogecoin has pumped a lot, then you are wrong. Shiba Inu has gained the most YOY and there are many other coins that performed better than Doge.
In which coins are you investing on Jan 2, 2022? Comment below
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