The past year has been full of significant events. In particular, the market capitalization of the cryptocurrency temporarily reached $ 3 trillion, the SEC approved the first Bitcoin ETF and the NFT craze drove the price of many tokens to unimaginable heights. Here are the six numbers that will make up the face of the crypto market in 2021 and what they will mean for the next year.

# 1: 11%

On November 10, 2021, Bitcoin price hit an all-time high of nearly $ 69,000, up 120% year over year, pushing crypto market cap to $ 3 trillion. This number helped make BTC capitalization 11% of the gold capitalization. Just three years ago the total market capitalization was about 2.8% that of the precious metal.

Bitcoin and Ethereum will have a significantly better performance than gold in 2021 | Source: TradingView

Even so, BTC is still not the best performer in 2021. Ethereum is up 443% since last year and is even being swarmed by many other competitors. This shows that crypto in general, and Bitcoin in particular, has found a place as its surge coincides with record inflation.

# 2: 123.02

The estimated annual energy consumption of Bitcoin miners is 123.02 terawatt hours (TW / h – a measure of electricity). According to Cambridge University’s Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, this roughly corresponds to the electricity consumption of Argentina, Colombia, Norway, Sweden and Ukraine in a given year. As Bitcoin rebounded that year, the hashrate spiked significantly to hit several spring highs.

As you can see in the chart below, the hashrate saw a significant drop after China cracked down on its entire mining industry in the summer. However, the losses have been made up and further growth is imminent. Plus, the top miners plan to add hundreds of thousands of new miners by 2022, so this is just the beginning. Bitcoin’s carbon footprint will inevitably increase as key parties refuse to move to greener alternatives due to concerns about the security or centralization of the network. So the best solution is to look for renewable energy sources or buy CO2 offsets.

Bitcoin hashrate recovers quickly after China ban

# 3: $ 233.276

This is the minimum price for the Bored Ape Yacht Club Monkey Collection. The CryptoPunks Monkey and Bored Ape Yacht Club Monkey, launched in 2017 and 2021 respectively, are pretty hot ‘pfp’ collections. You may have stumbled upon one of the 10,000 species of CryptoPunk or BAYC monkeys available as a Twitter avatar, Gmail logo, Facebook profile picture, or even a LinkedIn snap. In the NFT world, the “floor” for the NFT is the lowest price that can be purchased in this asset class. Most of the sales for one of the oldest and most popular NFT collectibles, CryptoPunk, top that number. The reserve price, perhaps even higher than that of digital artist Beeple, who sells a work of art for a staggering $ 69 million, has heralded a hectic 2021 for the NFT market.

By 2022, NFT is sure to become even more popular as prominent exchanges like Coinbase, FTX, Crypto.com, and Blockchain.com open their own marketplaces. This means that the marketplace is asking developers to find ways to make them more accessible to everyday investors, who make up 80% of all NFT buyers who can’t afford six, seven, or eight numbers.

# 4: $ 27,000,000,000

This is the total amount of funding crypto companies raised from venture capitalists in 2021, more than the last 10 years combined.

Additionally, nearly all of the 10 largest rounds of investment of the year, grossing more than $ 6.3 billion, were the largest rounds in the industry to close. The two largest companies are crypto service provider NYDIG, which rose $ 1 billion this month to a whopping $ 25 billion just a year ago. This is perhaps one of the most impressive examples of the industry’s phenomenal growth over the past 12 years. FTX’s rapid success has also made 29-year-old founder Sam Bankman-Fried the richest billionaire under 30, with assets of $ 26.5 billion.

In addition, the appetite for risk capital is growing. Last month, crypto-focused investment firm Paradigm announced a $ 2.5 billion venture fund that surpasses Andreessen Horowitz III’s $ 2.2 billion crypto fund, which was previously a fund war of its kind .

10 Biggest Crypto Fundraising Round Ever

# 5: $ 12 billion

This is the estimated capital raised to build Metaverse in 2021. Led by Epic Games, which raised $ 1 billion earlier this year to maintain its competitive edge over open source competitors based on blockchain. According to the venture capital data site Crunchbase, over 700 metaverse-related deals were closed this year in areas as diverse as online gaming and augmented reality (which may also overlap with blockchain).

In April, Forbes sold the first NFT magazine cover for $ 333,333. The cover is called Masters of the Metaverse and features Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the twins who later raised $ 400 million to build their cryptocurrency exchange and invest in a number of related projects.

Metaverse is sure to be one of the hottest topics of 2022 as data from Google Trends shows searches for the term have increased 1,000% over the past few months, and well-known industry-related tokens such as AXS, MANA and SAND also saw record growth.

Metaverse searches will increase by the end of 2021

# 6: 88%

Open Interest (OI), i.e. the number of outstanding contracts at CME, has so far skyrocketed in the fourth quarter of this year. Despite the continuation of the 2020 bull cycle through early 2021, open interest turned negative in the spring as the institutes eased some of their bets. The introduction of Ether Futures and later Micro Bitcoin Futures did little to stimulate new open interest growth. In the first nine months of 2021, crypto open interest fell 14%.

The introduction of Bitcoin futures in October increased the demand for the CME-based contracts. Source: CFTC

But then came the fourth quarter, with the main catalyst being the US SEC’s approval of a Bitcoin futures ETF that is only traded on the CME. The dollar value of CME crypto futures contracts reached around $ 4.7 billion per day in October 2021, up 783% year over year, temporarily making CME one of the largest electronics exchanges in the world. After launching three Bitcoin ETFs, CME Crypto’s open interest is now 12% up from the 2020 record, and the dollar value of these contracts is up 351% to $ 5 billion. With this dynamic, the CME will boom in 2022. Much more competition is expected than in 2021, however, and some of the CME’s exclusivity positions could be lifted if the SEC clears an ETF for delivery.

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