Top 5 crypto trends in 2021

                                                            Man kann mit Sicherheit sagen, dass 2021 ein besonders explosives Jahr für den gesamten Cryptowährungsmarkt war.  Es war auch eines, in dem sich besonders starke Erzählungen um verschiedene Segmente drehten – ein Jahr voller Handlungsänderungen und verschiedener Metagames.

With this in mind, we took the liberty of picking five of the most influential trends of the past 12 months before the last hours of the year. The following do not have any particular ranking as they all excel in certain areas.

So without further ado, let’s dive in.

Memecoins

Although some might argue that memecoins will be released in 2020 during the so-called DeFi-Summer, in 2021 – on a few occasions – they were objectively the focus of attention.

In contrast to other trends, however, Memecoins seem to have been driven by a central authority – so to speak. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, as well TIME Magazine Person of the YearHe single-handedly created tremendous awareness of what is unanimously known as the King of the Memecoins – Dogecoin.
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Dogecoin (DOGE) may have started as a joke years ago, but is now one of the world’s leading cryptocurrency projects with hundreds of thousands of HODLers and one of the strongest communities. Additionally, with the obvious assistance from Musk, DOGE is eventually accepted by Tesla for some of its merchandise.

the Cryptocurrency is up nearly 4,000% at the time of this writing, although it hit 76% below its May All time high written down.

But what Dogecoin did was far more than just an increase in value. It inspired an entire movement of memecoins, many with alarmingly similar features that flooded the market in the months to come.

One of the most vivid examples is Shiba Inu’s SHIB token. The self-proclaimed “Dogecoin Killer” is one of the top performing cryptocurrencies of the year, with multiple stories of people who invested just $ 100 a year ago and became multimillionaires. While it’s 60% below its all-time high, SHIB is up 44,636,200% in the last 12 months alone.

In addition, Memecoins became a household name and a viable marketplace strategy. The rise of Doge and Shiba has shown that coins named for popular dog breeds clearly fit the product market, and many teams have started exploring different avenues and creating what many consider legitimate business platforms.

If one thing is clear now, it is that everyone takes memes unanimously, ironically.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs)

Non-fungible tokens have been at the forefront of the cryptocurrency industry for quite some time. It is also one of the trends that is responsible for many newcomers in this field.

One reason for this could be that the normal Joe doesn’t associate NFTs with complex economic models and tries to disrupt monetary policy. For most people, NFTs are just proven to be rare displays of digital art that are fun.

Where else can you see a digital drawing that can be literally right-clicked and saved as a $ 8 million JPEG sale?
1 of 9 Alien CryptoPunks. Sold for $ 8 million.
Of course, it’s not that easy – NFTs carry the artist’s digital signature and are impossible to reproduce, which makes each one essentially unique unless it is created in large numbers from generation to generation.

Perhaps the most haunting story regarding NFTs is the astronomical sale of Beeples The first 5,000 days. This is a combination of 5,000 digital works of art that Mike Winkelmann (aka Beeple) produced over 5,000 days. The piece sold for a whopping $ 69 million at a Christie’s auction, making him one of the top three most valuable artists alive.

From Crypto Punks, Rocks, Bored Apes Yacht Club, Rumble Kongs, and Hashmass to literal numbers on a white background, NFTs can be found everywhere. What’s even more interesting is that this trend is apparently not slowing down. While it’s true that retail interest in NFTs has declined, it’s also important to note that these tokens are a cornerstone of our next mention – the metaverse and play-to-earn model.

Play-to-Earn (P2E)

Blockchain and online gaming are two areas that have been touted as going hand in hand for quite some time. In the past few years we’ve seen some games based on distributed ledger technology, but nothing has really caught on up to this point.
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Well, that changed in 2021 and especially in the late third and fourth quarters. It was none other than Axie Infinitywho led the march all year round. One of its native tokens – AXS – rose from around $ 0.5 to hit an all-time high of $ 160 in November. At the time of this writing, the token is up nearly 17,000% in the past 12 months alone, despite trading well below its ATH. Additionally, not so long ago, a piece of land in the Axie Infinity universe was sold for $ 2.3 million.

However, the entire P2E genre took off after Facebook announced it would be renamed Meta and become an active player in building the metaverse. When that happened, it continued. The play-to-earn field was picking up steam and is still raging at the time of this writing.

Projects like The sandbox and Decentraland made it way into the top 50 and the latter even outperformed Axie Infinity as the largest gaming project.

Well, it seems that the concept of the metaverse is all around us and the hype is real. Hundreds of teams are battling to create a blue chip blockchain game that would win the player base and become an established leader. Maybe that will happen in 2022, who knows?

Binance smart chain mania

If we saw the DeFi summer last year Ethereumthen we saw the same madness on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) this year.

The demand for decentralized apps became so great that they literally clogged the Ethereum network. User-intensive processes increased the burden to the extent that hundreds of dollars had to be paid in transaction fees, making it virtually impossible for smaller investors to get involved in decentralized finance (DeFi).

However, as the yield farming metagame grew in popularity, alternatives began to emerge to captivate all of the frustrated DeFi degens who were fed up with paying a lot of money for Ethereum.

How the Binance Smart Chain works became known. In the second week of February, the unique addresses on BSC tripled. In March, the number of transactions on PancakeSwap (the largest DEX on BSC) was higher than on the entire Ethereum network for a period of 24 hours.
BSCScan
In April, the total value locked in PancakeSwap reached $ 5.5 billion, temporarily surpassing the TVL in Uniswap.

On all of the projects we’ve seen Ethereum have suddenly been replicated on BSC by other teams, but as history should further show, this was in vain. The vast majority of them are currently well underwater as the hype surrounding BSC slowly subsided. Although the number of unique addresses continues to grow, it is nowhere near the temperature it was during that time.

It’s also worth noting that this entire trend is one of the reasons Binance Coin (BNB) has also risen by over 1200% in the past 12 months.

Laser eyes: Bitcoin to $ 100,000

Laser eyes are a Bitcoin-centric trend that has also seen a lot of hype throughout the year. Basically, someone came up with the idea of ​​putting laser eyes on their Twitter profile picture and leaving it that way until the price of BTC hits $ 100,000.

Huge numbers of people, including MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor, US Senator Cynthia Lummis, and even our own Potato, succumbed to this idea and participated in what appears to be one of the biggest movements of the year.
The crypto community under the eyes of the laser. Twitter by Mike Dudas
To date, Michael Saylor has his Twitter profile picture laser-eyed, leading many to believe that he is making the trade with the highest conviction on Wall Street.

In any case, the trend was a bit short-lived, with Bitcoin price plummeting around 50% shortly after it began, leading some to speculate that this particular hype was certain of a top signal.

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