A Comparison of the 2018 and 2022 Crypto Market
Looking back at the state of the market in 2017, we encounter an entirely different picture.
Established brand names are losing their top positions, losing much of their appeal to the public.
2021 was the year of dogs and meme coins. New projects appeared (Polkadot, Solana, Polygon) and presented like financial opportunities investors shouldn’t skip.
Still, when considering fundamentals like decentralization and permissionless transactions, these new projects cannot keep up with their established competitors.
Even Ethereum has shifted into a different direction, leaving behind PoW and the decentralization that mining provided. Perhaps issues will arise for Ethereum regarding the centralization of validators (a problem every other PoS network faces).
We shouldn’t forget the 2022 Terra Luna fiasco, a cryptocurrency advertised as an investing priority, similar to the aforementioned projects.
As the dust from the market collapse settles, some doubts and issues arise regarding the investing habits of newcomers in crypto, both funds, and retail.
New investors didn’t perform research this time, but invested according to Tweets and Reddit posts alone.
The Market In November 2018 (exactly four years ago)
This is the historic screenshot from November 4th, 2018, taken from coinmarketcap. A different picture from 2022.
An index that makes us question a lot about this market.
Even Bitcoin Diamond was hanging at 32nd place, a coin newcomers probably don’t even know exists (as many more in this list).
IOTA, Dash, XVG, NEO, NEM, Icon, Lisk, Qtum, Nano, OmiseGo, Ontology, and many more were all advertised as technological wonders in the blockchain universe and considered a sure bet for the future.
Crypto media presented all these projects in a similar approach to Solana, Polygon, Avalance, Polkadot, Chainlink, etc.
Solana is the new IOTA, Polygon the new NEO, Avalanche the new Icon, and Polkadot the new Qtum. We know where this is going.
There will be new projects in 2024, and investors will rush to buy them speculatively, not for their disruptive abilities, but because they encountered something new and heavily advertised.
And as happened with IOTA, XVG, NEO, Icon, and the rest of the 2018 list, the current “hot” projects will follow them into irrelevancy.
The Unique Case Of Cardano
Cardano managed to achieve better price related results with professional marketing in 2022. Not that Cardano delivered any substantial developments or a working and decentralized network, yet.
The issue here is that Cardano can't escape its inherent centralization issues. It will always be CharlesCoin. Still, with clever and professional marketing Cardano should be recognized as successful in attracting funds and investors.
Networks like Dash, Stellar, and XRP lost many places in market-cap indexes to Ethereum-clone projects. Only a few coins escaped this trajectory.
Bitcoin Cash & Monero
In 2022 the market severely punished decentralized coins containing extensive utility like Bitcoin Cash, Monero, and ZCash.
Funds and institutions pushed the market to new heights. These include pension funds, VCs, a few corporations, and various speculative funds seeking exposure in high-risk assets (crypto and tech).
They failed to realize the one fundamental that makes cryptocurrency possible: Decentralization.
All these investors considered centralized projects safe and supported several centralized projects with small teams controlling them, disregarding trustless and permissionless networks.
Perhaps these investors should consider buying PayPal stocks instead of crypto if this is their approach.
Crypto is not a stepping stone for CBDCs.
The same funds still support centralized entities like BNB, Cardano, and XRP, and allow centralized stablecoins like USDT and USDC to grow at the expense of permissionless financial networks that work perfectly for payments.
The current market makes little sense
It is also confusing when indexes like Coinmarketcap and Coingecko include stablecoins and wrapped Coins like WBTC and SETH (Lido Staked Eth). BTC and ETH locked in a contract should either be removed from the market cap of BTC and ETH or not presented at all as wrapped assets in indexes.
Three stablecoins dominate the top 10.
Serves no purpose in adding stablecoins together with volatile cryptocurrency assets. A stablecoin can be either 1 or 0 (USD). There is no purpose in adding them next to the rest cryptocurrencies.
The "Metaverse" Field
Within the currently called "metaverse coins" a surprising indicator appears:
These two projects, now called Metaverse tokens (Decentraland and Sandbox) move identically with a market cap of $1,2 Billion.
However, both have to handle several issues that indicate their future may not be as bright as the crypto media thinks.
Decentraland suffers from Ethereum’s high fees, while the Sandbox is at the hands of Binance and the centralization of BSC.
Conclusion
Time-tested decentralized blockchains with remarkable developments, fast and cheap transactions will not lose their appeal.
Cryptocurrencies containing these fundamentals will outshine weak competitors.
Between 2020-2021 investors mostly unaware of cryptocurrency, hurried to place their bets in untested new projects that don’t even deliver stable networks (Polygon, Solana).
Funds and retail invested without any research following fund managers' and social media influencers' advice.
In the future, we should expect changes as time-tested cryptocurrencies will outperform weak centralized projects that mostly appeared during the previous bull run.
Decentralized cryptocurrencies are out of anyone's reach.
Anything else will always be a controlled, confiscatable, censorable, and incompetent clone of the legacy financial establishment.
Cover picture background: source (Supplied: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI)
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I just engaged to cryptocurrency this year so I am honored to witnessed how it was pretty going well during 2018. Anyways, the only constant thing in this world is change, everything has to be changed and we have to accept it and make use of it.