2021 was a busy year for the crypto industry, with cryptocurrencies hitting record highs, stablecoins making a mark, regulators cautiously coming on board and several more exciting developments. The Block Research’s Digital Asset 2022 Outlook provides a snapshot of all key developments the industry witnessed through the year, and it shows remarkable progress since the past year.

Most of the growth in the total market cap of the industry can be attributed to leader Bitcoin hitting new ATHs close to $67,000 and giving back nearly 100% gains this year. This helped increase the attractiveness of digital assets and brought more retail and institutional investors towards Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies. It’s interesting how the report highlights Solana and Avalanche as the breakout winners of the year, along with memecoins Shiba Inu and Dogecoin.

The rising interest in cryptocurrencies and digital assets saw venture capitalists rush to companies in this sector as well, with firms receiving around $24.7 billion worth of investment so far in 2021. This is far higher than the combined investment of $14.4 billion crypto companies have received during the previous six years. The stellar growth in investments have helped at least 65 companies achieve the status of unicorn – being valued at $1 billion or more.

While DeFi saw an increased level of interest and growth, other key sectors that exploded were NFTs and GameFi in 2021. Around 42% of all VC investment deals in the crypto market were focused on firms working with NFTs or gaming.

Meanwhile, DEXs saw their trading volume surge by as much as 522% YoY through 2021, peaking at $163 billion during May. The demand for DeFi has seen almost 2% of the total BTC supply in the market being in a wrapped form on the Ethereum network. The total amount of wrapped Bitcoin on Ethereum has surged from 140k in 2020 to 317k BTC, amounting to around 1.7% of the total supply.