2021 Crypto highlights

Hey r/cc fam! We've almost made it through yet another year. While most of this year was spent sitting at home staring into space, it was also a landmark year in terms of cryptocurrency adoption. Here are a few pieces of news over the year that I believe were defining moments in some form or the other. I haven't categorized them as positive or negative, because that's up to you to interpret. Without further ado, here we go:

• Cryptocurrency market cap hits 3T+.
• El Salvador makes BTC legal tender. An absolute landmark event for Bitcoin
• The NFT mania begins earlier this year, and hits a peak in August. The NFT.NYC event in particular sees an attendance of over 5000 people. Beeple's "Everydays"is currently the most expensive one sold, at 69.3m USD.
• Dog coins see plenty of noobs buying in. Floki goes as far as even getting advertisements in airports.
• Layer 2 protocols blow up in the light of extremely high ETH gas fees: SOL, AVAX, FTM, MATIC and BSC in particular do well.
• Saylor does what Saylor does and has stocked up on Bitcoin throughout the year.
• Tesla buys and accepts bitcoin, then sells a portion and stops accepting bitcoin citing environmental issues.
• More regulations from various governments, but still the end goal is still unclear. The EU's proposal seems to be the only one that seems well researched, thus far.
• Crypto.com goes ballistic on marketing, and also buys naming rights to Staples stadium.
• Paypal accepts bitcoin for transactions.
• Kusama and Polkadot auctions are a grand success.
• Germany leads the way for EU with their Specialfonds law
• China bans crypto - AGAIN. This leads to miners moving to more miner-friendly countries, leading to a US based mining pool (Foundry) achieving 17% of global bitcoin mining power.
• Cardano launches smart contracts.
• Bitcoin ETF - still a no go, but seemingly likely in 2022.
• Several newbie investors fomo in on meme/shitcoins in hopes of getting rich quick. Safemoon and Shiba in particular stand out. And then we have the Squid game token, which no one was able to sell.
• Defi hacks: Several billion dollars were stolen in public defi hacks. Among which most popular Snowdog, cream finance and Poly. Poly in particular being something that could end up being a series, with the hacker returning the stolen funds.
• Mini bear market preview in the summer, with everything going down about 50% or so. Those who loaded up on solid coins/tokens at this time have at the least 2x'd their investments.
• DeFI becomes more mainstream. Almost 300b in TVL at the moment.
• ETH continues to push to a PoS system.
• USDT comes under fire several times over the year, but the bubble is yet to burst.
• The Turkish Lira loses over 40% of its value, and Turks consider using crypto as a means to hedge against inflation.
• MOONs hit ATH of $0.39.
• The Metaverse mania is here. My own take aside, this is the current hype machine.

And a quick take away of the current top 5 and their performance (YTD, as of 2 December):

1) BTC: 107.03%

2) ETH: 526.81%

3) BNB: 1596.88%

4) SOL: 14941.56%

5) ADA: 866.02%

In the top 50, Shiba is the undisputed winner with an increase of a staggering 5548371%, followed by GALA at a modest 48278%.

A note that many of these headlines have been simplified for the purpose of easy reading, and of course, it doesn't have all events that happened. This is just from my PoV. Hope you enjoy reading!