Top Crypto Trends of 2022 & 2023
Anchor Protocol
Anchor Protocol is a decentralized content sharing protocol that allows for the safe and secure sharing of files between users. The protocol is built on the Ethereum blockchain and allows for the storage and sharing of files of any size or type.
Hodlnaut
Hodlnaut is a Singapore-based platform for borrowing and lending cryptocurrency. The platform allows cryptocurrency investors to earn interest on their crypto through yield farming.
Polygon Network
Polygon Network or also known as Matic Network was launched in 2017 as a decentralized scaling platform that addresses the Ethereum platform's high transaction fees and slow transaction processing speeds. Polygon works on top of the Ethereum blockchain as a secondary scaling solution.
Koinly
Koinly is a crypto tax accounting and reporting platform that aims to make it easy for users to track all their crypto transactions and activities. The platform allows users to connect all of their wallets in one place, automatically calculate their crypto taxes, and generate compliant tax reports
Play To Earn
Play to Earn or P2E is a gaming trend that encourages people to make money by playing games. The trend can be seen in the rise of games that offer in-game microtransactions as a way to make money in the form of NFT or crypto. These games often offer players the chance to earn rewards by playing the game more regularly.
Fireblocks
Fireblocks is a blockchain security platform for securing digital assets in transit (moving, storing, or issuing) using advanced technologies like MPC (multi-party computation) cryptography and chip isolation technology.
QuickSwap
QuickSwap is a DeFi (decentralized finance) platform and the biggest decentralized exchange (DEX) built on the Polygon Network. It uses the AMM (automated market maker) model to create liquidity pools of tokens that users can access to swap and earn transaction fees from others who swap their tokens using the pools.
Move To Earn
Move to Earn or M2E is a concept under gaming crypto finance aimed at getting people to move more in order to improve their overall health and well-being. Move-to-earn games reward users with cryptocurrency for doing activities like workouts, running, or walking.
FTX
FTX is a cryptocurrency exchange platform founded by MIT alumni Sam Bankman-Fried and Gary Wong in 2019. FTX trading products include options, derivatives, and leveraged tokens.
Pionex
Pionex is a Singapore-based cryptocurrency exchange platform with built-in crypto trading bots launched in 2019. The platform allows its users to trade manually or to use its trading bots to automate their trades.
Mirror Protocol
Mirror Protocol is a synthetic assets DeFi (decentralized finance) protocol powered by smart contracts on the Terra network. The protocol enables the creation of mAssets (mirrored assets) which are synthetic assets which mirror the price behavior of real-world assets.
Liquidity Mining
Liquidity Mining is a term that is used to describe the process of earning money from the difference in the buying and selling prices of a security or commodity. The term is often used in the cryptocurrency market, where investors can buy and sell digital currencies quickly and at a profit.
Chainalysis
Chainalysis is a software company that specializes in blockchain analysis. The company offers a variety of services, including transaction monitoring, anti-money laundering, and fraud detection.
MoonPay
MoonPay is a payment system that allows for the use of cryptocurrencies for online and in-store payments. The system is designed to be easy to use and allows for the use of a variety of cryptocurrencies.
SushiSwap
SushiSwap is a DeFi (decentralized finance) platform that allows users to exchange cryptocurrency assets and earn fees by contributing crypto to a liquidity pool. Transactions take place without an intermediary with its own automated market maker (AMM) which means that a pricing algorithm is used to price assets, unlike traditional exchanges which use an order book.
Bitsgap
Bitsgap is a cryptocurrency trading platform that allows users to buy and sell cryptocurrencies. The platform offers a variety of features, including a user-friendly interface, real-time pricing, and 24/7 customer support.
Crypto Staking
Crypto staking is a process through which users can earn rewards for holding cryptocurrency. By locking up coins in a staking wallet, users can earn a percentage of the block rewards for participating in the network.
Arbismart
Arbismart is a crypto arbitrage platform that uses AI to generate passive income for its users by profiting from the price difference of buying an asset in one market and selling it in another.
CBDC
CBDC stands for Central Bank Digital Currency. A CBDC is a form of electronic money or virtual money that is backed by a government's central bank unlike digital forms of money on bank accounts or payment apps which are a liability of a commercial bank. Unlike cryptocurrencies which use permissionless open networks, CBDCs use private permissioned blockchain networks.
Crypto Farming
Crypto farming is a process where people can use their computer’s power to mine for cryptocurrencies. The process can be done by using special software that allows the user to use the computer’s power to solve complex mathematical problems.
Crypto ETF
A Crypto ETF is a type of ETF that invests in cryptocurrencies. The ETF is designed to provide investors with exposure to the cryptocurrency market and to allow for diversification in the cryptocurrency space.
Token Burn
A token burn or crypto burn is the process of destroying a certain number of tokens as a way to reduce the total supply of tokens in circulation. The purpose of a token burn is to decrease the inflation rate and increase the value of the remaining tokens.
Unstoppable Domains
Unstoppable Domains is a company that provides users with the ability to purchase and own domain names that are not subject to censorship. The company was founded in 2018 with the goal of providing a censorship-resistant domain name system. The blockchain-based domain names also serves to replace cryptocurrency addresses with human-readable URLs.
Yield Farming
Yield farming is a DeFi (decentralized finance) investment strategy that involves lending or staking crypto or tokens in order to generate high returns. Yield farmers earn passive income by storing their crypto in a liquidity pool.
Compound Protocol
Compound protocol is a DeFi protocol or blockchain-based smart contract built on the Ethereum platform that allows users to lend and borrow cryptocurrencies.
STEPN
STEPN is a move-to-earn NFT game that rewards users for walking or running. Users choose a digital sneaker on the platform that matches their fitness level - allowing them to earn tokens when their speed falls within the activity range of their selected sneaker.
Trend Highlight – The Rise of Mudrex
The problem in investment research has switched from one of scarcity to one of abundance: there are more sites than ever with investment pitches, ranging from professionally-produced writeups at communities like SumZero to one-off recommendations on Twitter and Stocktwits. This has made filtering, rather than aggregating, the key value-add.
This effect has played out in countless other spaces, including everything from news to adult content. With adult content, so much noise is created by the abundance of free explicit content that consumers are now willing to open their wallets for a more authentic and curated experience. And in the media industry too: The abundance of free online data and analysis has often led to a decline in quality and authenticity, and as has been the case with porn, consumers are consequently willing to pay in order to separate the signal from the noise.
As the world saw the rise of trading apps like Robinhood, the subsequent rise in the noise of public advice was significant. It ushered in the growth of platforms like TipRanks, where users can follow others’ trades– and see the success of those trades mapped out on a global leaderboard.
Copy Trading, as it’s known, has been on the rise. One of the fastest-growing DeFi companies in this category is Mudrex: With over 100K users in over 100 countries, Mudrex’s 82% direct site traffic metric indicates a high rate of users returning to the site or even having it bookmarked––For a full report on the crypto industry, by Glimpse, respond “crypto” to this email.
A clever way some copy trading sites fully capture consumer surplus is by charging more for certain file format exports: Since Excel is ubiquitous and essential in the professional finance industry, this is a way to have a product priced so that hobbyist day traders will buy it—and then to charge finance industry customers a steeper price. Like gaming chairs, which are more comfortable than similarly-priced office chairs, but designed to be too gaudy for the office, some Trading sites using this strategy find a way to capture consumer surplus and charge its audience what they’re willing to pay.
Trend Highlight – Stripe for Crypto – The Rise of MoonPay
Moonpay is building Stripe for cryptocurrency: a simple way for merchants to let users either spend cryptocurrency or buy it, through just a few lines of code. Moonpay's fees are slightly higher than standard transaction processing fees, but in the case of crypto there's more risk from fraud and regulation. In fraud terms, since cryptocurrencies are easily transferable, they're a potential way for credit card thieves to extract money from stolen cards. On the regulatory side, Moonpay needs to comply with Know Your Customer frameworks and Anti-Money Laundering rules. First-time spenders need to verify their identity with government IDs, utility bills or other proofs-of-identity.
If Moonpay is trying to be Stripe, it raises a simple question: why isn't the Stripe of cryptocurrency. Stripe? Stripe actually offered support Bitcoin payments but ultimately dropped it. Their reasoning was that merchants who accepted Bitcoin were not used to the high volatility: a customer might spend $100 on a product, but the merchant could end up receiving $80 if the price of Bitcoin fluctuated during the transaction. Since payment processing is low-margin, and customer service is expensive, the small number of Bitcoin transactions didn't justify the complexity of explaining Bitcoin to customers. Moonpay's crypto-only approach obviates this problem; they focus on the narrow set of merchants and spenders who are already comfortable with crypto volatility. In the long run, Moonpay is banking on volatility falling as cryptocurrency adoption increases. And given the friction of setting up verification in order to be able to use any crypto payment option like this means consumers will want to stick with the first one they use. This dynamic gives the space a strong first mover advantage.
Trend Highlight – Taxes for Crypto
Intuit and H&R Block run ads to make the public feel like taxes are not complicated, but behind the scenes, tax prep companies spend millions every year lobbying the government to make taxes more complicated so they can keep their business. In fact, in many other countries, taxes can be incredibly simple—in Sweden, for example, they can be paid by text message.
The complexity of taxes is partly a function of lobbying, partly a function of the cat-and-mouse game of closing loopholes, and, in the case of cryptocurrency, partly caused by new assets that are bought, sold, and traded in novel ways.
Koinly is a crypto-focused tax product that helps users navigate difficulties like tax lots, airdrops, DeFi interest payments, and trades across multiple exchanges. It sells its software both to individual users and to accountants who need crypto help. Koinly imports lists of transactions and outputs the taxable income that resulted from them, saving people the tedious and error-prone process of running the numbers themselves. One way the company maximizes margins is to charge based on the number of transactions. This number doesn't affect Koinly's own costs in any meaningful way, but it's a good way to identify customers who can afford the product—and probably can't afford to spend hours manually navigating their numbers.
Koinly’s relationship with the rest of the tax industry is both as a service and a source of leads: for complicated cases, they refer users to CPAs.
With the growth of alternative assets like cryptocurrency and NFTs, there’s room for a tax preparation service that can displace the legacy incumbents in this $100 billion industry, first by solving specialized problems and then extending their service to the entire tax prep process. Cryptocurrencies collectively have a two trillion dollar market value, and since the prices for most of them started close to zero, and are extremely volatile, many holders have large capital gains—which means a healthy budget for doing their taxes, and a lot of paperwork if they try to do taxes themselves.
