BCB Group, Europe’s leading provider of business accounts and trading services for the digital asset economy, have looked into some of the key crypto market trends of 2021 and have revealed their thoughts on what we can expect to see happening in the crypto space for the rest of 2022.
A few years ago, DeFi and NFTs were non-existent, and cryptocurrency was used as an umbrella term for everything that existed in that ecosystem. However, with the growth of DeFi, in the last year especially, and NFT surging in popularity , in 2022 crypto can be said to be teetering on the mainstream.
Research shows that, in 2021, large institutional investors that entered the crypto market pushed the total market value north of $3trn in November. Adoption of cryptocurrency as a means of payment (Visa, Mastercard, Venmo) has also become more widespread.
Along with seeing some significant changes in the Bitcoin market, data analysts at BCB Group have revealed that Dogecoin had a massive increase of 705.58% in February 2021 along with Solana, which rocketed by 11,228.11% over the course of the year. Tether (USDT), the popular stable coin, also had a good year, becoming the third-largest crypto by market cap.
To help capture the overall picture of what has happened in the crypto market throughout 2021, data analysts at BCB Group have looked into BTC, ETH, SOL and DOGE and shared which key events have caused these coins to spike or fall in price.
Key moments that impacted the BTC market in 2021:
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Spike – 29th Jan 2021 – We saw a spike in Bitcoin after Elon Musk added the hashtag #bitcoin to his Twitter bio.
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Fall – 13th May 2021 – Tesla announced that they would not be accepting Bitcoin as payment.
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Rise – 21st July 2021 – Tesla U-turned their previous statement and announced that they would start to accept Bitcoin as a form of payment.
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Fall – 8th September 2021 – El Salvador had a technical glitch, which caused a market crash, one day after officially making Bitcoin legal tender.
Key moments that impacted the ETH market in 2021:
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Fall – 12th May 2021 – A sharp decline in ETH’s value came after China banned financial and payment institutions from providing cryptocurrency services – this is not the first time in China’s history that they have made this announcement. As China holds possibly the world’s largest population, having a ban on crypto services meant that the overall investment dropped.
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Fall – 21st July 2021 – London hard fork. Shareholders had a conference in London, hence the name London In Hardfork. The majority of shareholders decided which way the network was to upgrade in order to make it a better ecosystem for its users. It is traditionally called a “fork” as it presents a different path to the future.
Key moments that impacted the SOL market in 2021:
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Rise – End of August 2021 – Possible entry to Wall Street. The Solana network became an attraction to investors on Wall Street and with the news that high profile business entities with huge investment capital at their disposal, people bought them with the hope that when these large corporations did invest, the price would go to the moon.
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Fall – 28th October 2021 – Technical analysis says that the stock is oversold, causing traders to sell off the currency, which led to a price plunge. Analysis showed that SOL had been oversold, following news articles claiming the coins listing on Wall Street and nothing happening – this led to a sell off, with people taking profits where they could.
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Fall – 3rd December 2021 – This fall can be attributed to the general crypto crash. All altcoins tend to follow Bitcoin’s path of growth or decline – as such, all coins took a hard hit in the December crash.
Key moments that impacted the DOGE market in 2021:
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Rise – 13th April 2021 – Elon Musk wrote a tweet advising that Dogecoin would be the currency going to the moon. After this post, a hashtag called #tothemoon went viral across Twitter and caused the price of DOGE to soar.
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Fall – 15th May 2021 – The price of Dogecoin dropped dramatically after Elon Musk’s appearance on Saturday Night Live. On the popular American show, the multibillionaire expressed that he was worried about the environmental impact of crypto on the environment and, as a result of this public announcement, the price of Dogecoin plummeted overnight.
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Fall – 21st June 2021 – A Redditor named Dogefather created a post on the platform saying just “21st June, Mark the date. Biggest ever Bull Run.” People suspected a pump and dump and immediately sold their stock before the dump happened causing the stock to fall
Head of Trading and Account Management Lux Thiagarajah, at BCB Group, shares his thoughts on the crypto market and what people can expect in 2022:
“As last year has shown, the potential growth rate of the NFT market is huge. We expect this market segment to further develop in 2022 as traditional institutions express interest in how they are held and valued.
“The crypto markets are now at a point where they are simply too big to ignore, however, this does not mean that they are exempt from the potential to fail. Central banks like China and India have expressed intentions to release digital currencies and a desire to focus on the regulation of stablecoins.”
“Bitcoin will continue to lead the crypto market as, despite promising projects from the likes of ETH and SOL, it still is yet to have a true rival – at least in the world of crypto. It is always judged on a relative basis to gold, if Bitcoin value was equal to the gold’s market cap.”
“Ethereum has been the King of layer 1 protocols, but 2021 saw the emergence of the Prince, Solana. Ethereum’s competitors are taking different approaches to solving the scalability issues. Solana focuses on speed and is happy to compromise decentralisation. Solana could well continue to eat into ETH’s dominance this year.”
“While so called Ethereum killers are likely to gain popularity, the long awaited launch of ETH2.0 will address many of the issues that have heated up competition in the altcoin space. The ‘Merge’ to a proof of stake system is likely to see a faster network with lower transaction fees while using a tiny fraction of electricity used by Bitcoin. The promise of Ethereum 2.0 has been on the cards for a number of years though it looks like 2022 could be the year it becomes a reality.”
