Mahi Sall, Advisor, Fintech-Bank Partnerships, Payments and Financial Inclusivity
January 25th, 2023
Mahi Sall is the CEO & Founder of FinXpair, a Berlin-based strategic advisory boutique firm focu[...]
Crypto 2022 Year in Review
Tristram Waye for Bitvo | Dec 15, 2022
Image: Unsplash/Zero Take
Oh, what a year this one has been. It’s like the longest yet fastest year in history. And we had it all, didn’t we? Lockdowns. Protests. Frozen assets. And some major tech crashes.
- Sunny days turned to dark skies: Looking back at 2021, you’d say, you know, that was wild. Some big moves in bitcoin and ether. Some huge new projects on the radar. And some developing projects got their stride. Coming into 2022, the Metaverse was hot.
- Digital land was the thing, and celebrities were staking their claim.
- The NFT craze started to ebb a bit, and auctions started to wane.
- After 50-100% growth in staff at almost every digital company on the planet in 2021, tech ran into the brick wall of reality going into Q2 2022.
- Inflation, driven by a combination of excess reserves, supply chain disruptions, and insane energy policies, finally put pressure on prices. So the central banks took flight torching economies around the world with the fastest, most aggressive upside move in rates perhaps ever.
- But what they can’t control are supply chain problems, counterproductive energy policies, and a labour market tightened by unexplained excess deaths and disabilities among working-age people.
See: Alberta, The untold history of innovation from Canada’s badlands – Part 1
- Lockdowns and mandates over the winter gave rise to a convoy to Ottawa and a protest (broadcast widely to the world). If you’ve ever been to Ottawa or Montreal in February, you know no sane person would go there and stand outside all day unless it was important.
- The convoy raised more money in two weeks than any national political party. Which led to a panic and the invoking of the updated War Measures Act.
- Then in an unprecedented step, the government targeted people and froze their assets. But the government didn’t know about self-custody in crypto. So there was some confusion.
- NATO backed Ukraine in a conflict with Russia, which proved to be an important catalyst for numerous events.
- One aspect was cutting Russia off from financial infrastructure, followed by sanctions.
- Crypto stepped into the breach providing financial infrastructure for innocent citizens on both sides of the conflict. And western governments flooded the laundromat of the region with copious amounts of financial and military “aid.”
- Terra Luna. On Twitter, someone figured out how it could be thrown into a death spiral. The CEO denied it, which is the signal to any Wall or Bay Streeter that there is more than likely some truth to it. From denial to mushroom cloud took a matter of a week or two.
- The shockwave from Terra set off a cascade of losses across the industry. And as the liquidity tide went out, numerous other problems were revealed. Celsius, 3AC, Blockfi, Voyager, and many more...
See: Goldman Sachs Report: Future of Digital Assets and Crypto Winter’s Discontent
- Meta and NFTs: The Metaverse started the year with fanfare. Digital land was going for insane prices. Gaming, NFTs, and development followed.
- And by the third quarter, Meta had to admit that their signature investment was about as busy as Chernobyl.
- NFTs also went through a transformation. From the fanfare of early 2021, Topshots, Bored Apes, Punks, and many more became ETH storage devices.
- Trading across OpenSea went quiet. And the bustling NFT space dried up like an apple on a hot summer sidewalk.
- Diehards continue to build and 2022 was great for interoperability bridges including Vancouver’s LayerZero Labs.
- DeFi outperformed its naysayers
- From Binance without love: FTX imploded
- Crypto is still standing. After all of the excitement, one can be pretty confident that lots of the excesses have been removed from crypto.
- Infrastructure exists.
- Many of the bad actors have been exposed.
- And regulators know exactly where to focus their attention.
- All of which leaves more room for the good guys in crypto to develop, build and create a better future.
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