Original Author: ANDREW SINGER

Original compilation: Zion

The cryptocurrency and blockchain industry has experienced explosive growth in 2021, especially in its decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible token (NFT) sectors.

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Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan

When China effectively banned bitcoin mining operations in May 2021, Kazakhstan quickly stepped in, sending displaced miners and others to its cheap and plentiful coal supply. Numerous companies operate in the Central Asian country, including the top five crypto mining pools operated by BIT Mining.

In July 2021, Kazakhstan’s average monthly hash rate share was 18.1%, which means it accounted for almost one-fifth of global Bitcoin mining production, second only to the United States (42.7%), according to the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance , a staggering increase from just 1.4% in September 2019.

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Coinbase

Coinbase Global, the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, listed on Nasdaq on April 14, becoming the first crypto company to list on a U.S. stock exchange. The company closed the day at $328.28, giving it a market capitalization of $86 billion, a stunning first-day performance that has drawn comparisons to the IPOs of Facebook and Airbnb. However, the company's share price retreated towards the end of the year, trading at $243.35 on Dec. 18, and its market capitalization remains strong at $52.37 billion.

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Solana

2021 will see a wave of new smart contract networks. The largest and fastest-growing of these is Solana, a super-fast proof-of-stake network that can reportedly handle 50,000 transactions per second (TPS). In comparison, Ethereum can process only 30 transactions per second.

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Nayib Bukele/El Salvador

El Salvador made history in 2021 by becoming the first country to declare Bitcoin a legal tender. The country's dynamic president, Nayib Bukele, captivated the crypto world with what he did: harnessing the energy of volcanoes to power the country's BTC mining, airdropping $30 in BTC to every adult in the country, and Late November announced the launch of Bitcoin City, a fully functioning city built around Bitcoin, initially funded by $1 billion in Bitcoin bonds.

Only time will tell if all this equates to the apparent economic success of the people of El Salvador"victory"secondary title

Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple

In February, Christie's, the first major auction house to offer purely digital works with unique NFTs, auctioned off a digital collage without even a price tag. Nobody knows how to price it. Mike Winkelmann (aka Beeple)'s "Everydays: The First 5000 Days" sold for $69.3 million, something the art industry may never see again.

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Avalanche

Avalanche is another high-speed smart contract network breaking into the top 10 in 2021. According to CoinGecko, “Solana and Avalanche are the rising stars in the DeFi multi-chain,” with 6% and 2% shares of total value locked (TVL), respectively, in Q3. These TVL gains came at the expense of Ethereum, which had almost all of DeFi TVL (99%) at the start of the year. In comparison, Ethereum’s TVL share at the end of Q3 was 76%.

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Sam Bankman-Fried/FTX

In 2021, Sam Bankman-Fried was declared the "richest man in crypto," largely because of his stake in FTX, a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange he founded in 2019.

According to data from CoinGecko, by the end of 2021, FTX has become the second largest crypto derivatives exchange after Binance (futures). Messari called FTX "the fastest growing company ever," noting that Bankman-Fried built a $25 billion business in less than three years and with fewer than 100 employees.

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OpenSea

The NFT phenomenon has been a boon for digital artists, who can sell their work without agents and brick-and-mortar galleries, but they still need a digital marketplace. OpenSea, a pioneer in NFT art and the leading NFT marketplace, is one of this year's biggest winners.

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ProShares ETF

Something of a hurdle was overcome in mid-October with the launch of the first bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) approved by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF (BITO) debuted on the New York Stock Exchange with the second-highest volume opening fund ever, in what some are calling a “watershed moment for the crypto industry.”

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Meta（Diem）

Facebook’s Libra stablecoin project (now Diem), announced to much fanfare in 2019 with a cadre of blue-chip partners, has been delayed and scaled down.Today, one hears very little about Diem, except perhaps about departures — for example, Dante Disparte left Diem for Circle, and more recently, head of cryptocurrency David Marcus said he would be leaving the company by the end of the year .

Facebook's rebrand to Meta has come under fire from U.S. lawmakers for its "clout" over social media, and a stablecoin project slated to launch in early 2021 could be collateral damage.secondary title

central bank of nigeria

In February, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) ordered all local banks to close the accounts of customers using cryptocurrencies. The CBN governor said most crypto accounts are being used to finance “illegal” activities such as money laundering and terrorism.

Nigeria is expected to launch a central bank digital currency soon like China, so the CBN may be following China’s lead and clearing all rival cryptocurrency businesses ahead of the CBDC’s launch. If so, its efforts have failed utterly.

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Virgil Griffith

There was a time when Virgil Griffith was a celebrity in the crypto world. The former Ethereum developer and U.S. citizen traveled to North Korea in early 2019 to attend a cryptocurrency conference. In November of that year, he was arrested in Los Angeles for violating US sanctions laws.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin claimed at the time: “I don’t think what Virgil is doing is giving North Korea any real help in doing bad things. He’s speaking based on publicly available open source software information.”

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Iron Finance (TITAN)

Maybe collateralizing a stablecoin — such as IRON — with another stablecoin USDC and an unknown governance token (TITAN) is not a good idea. In this case, the result has been dubbed "the world's first massive crypto bank run" — specifically, a run on the Iron Finance protocol. The result: In late June, the price of TITAN plummeted from over $60 to a few thousandths of a cent in a matter of hours.

CipherTrace later said the incident was the result of a design flaw: "Iron.Finance lacked proper stabilization mechanisms." But at the same time, some investors lost heavily, including Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, He called for regulation to determine “what is a stablecoin and what collateral is acceptable.” On December 20, ICE was trading at around $0.002.