2021 wrap up, and we make bold predictions for 2022!

Tracey: [00:00:20] Welcome to the crypto curious podcast designed to help you navigate the dynamic world of cryptocurrency. Hello, my name's Tracy, and I'm joined by my mates, Blake and Craig. Hey, guys, how's it going? 

Blake: [00:00:32] Very well, Tracy, how are you? 

Tracey: [00:00:34] Very well, Craig. 

Craig: [00:00:35] Very well. Thank you, keen for this one. Going through the year, the year in review and the year coming up.

Tracey: [00:00:41] You are always keen, Craig. Yes. So today we thought we'd round out the that was and then give you some predictions for the year ahead because I know everyone's keen to know what happens to crypto in 2022. but let's go over some numbers for 2021. So how do we go this year? Craig? 

Craig: [00:01:01] So it's quite easy to get bogged down in the daily price action. So I've actually gone back and I've looked at the prices of four assets on January 1st, 2021. So let's look at the performance they've you've got Bitcoin, the king. Sixty five percent up, pretty impressive. Etherum, the coin, four hundred and fifty percent up, Polkadot up two hundred and twenty five percent. And now I've saved this one. Solana up just shy of 10000 percent. So it was madness. 

Tracey: [00:01:32] Wow. Wow, who got on Solana, who was on it?

Craig: [00:01:37] I remember I used to hold a lot of Solana at a dollar and I was like, If I thought that I would have been sorted.

Tracey: [00:01:44] I had a little bit and then got rid of it. 

Craig: [00:01:47] And I was actually looking through the list. Could you can you can go on historical snapshots on CoinMarketCap, which is pretty cool. So you can see what coins were at a particular day. And only 31 coins on January 1st, 2021, had over a billion dollar market cap. Now we have 110 at the time of recording, which is pretty impressive. That's like a 3x in just $1 billion market caps. And I also looked at the total crypto market cap was 800 billion, and now it actually touched three trillion in November. So that alone is a 275/300 percent increase. So what about you guys? Like, what was the highlights or surprises for you guys this year that really took you? 

Tracey: [00:02:35] I think they look, there's a lot that happened this year. I think this is the Solana pump. Watching that go vertical was amazing. You know, I wasn't on the train and got on and off a few times, but watching that was pretty cool. And then seeing the success of Axi, I mean, then that was pretty mind-blowing to watch. So that was interesting about you blame. 

Blake: [00:02:57] Yeah. Just to recap, is like a gaming crypto gaming project. And these really came to prominence over the last 12 months. You know, they they didn't really exist to broadly before this year, but certainly this year there's a lot of hype around this sector, and it was amazing to watch that, you know how quickly the adoption rose over this time. 

Tracey: [00:03:21] And we see that still. I mean, I don't see it stopping. I see that carrying on into 2022 and beyond. Agreed? 

Tracey: [00:03:27] Yeah, there's a bunch of games being brought out. And obviously this year, surprised me, the NFT space was just crazy this year. I think, you know, Bored Ape Yacht club, came out earlier this year, and now that's obviously the second biggest NFT project. And just the retail hype, the everyday investor getting on the meme coins like, you know, here we are trying to learn about decentralised finance, liquidity, pool yielding, and all we had to do was buy Doge on January one. Yeah, we would have been fine. 

Tracey: [00:04:03] I want to I want to bring it back to some important the important factors, because that's kind of a little a little look at a few things that happened and you've given us some numbers there. But I want to go back to the broader scheme and I want to look at some stuff that's happened in the world today and reinforces why cryptocurrencies on the whole is important. So what factors are perhaps contributing to the financial woes that we see out there? So Blake, you know where I'm going with that? Yeah. 

Blake: [00:04:31] So over the last 18 months, we've seen a lot of stimulus in the global economy with governments, you know, responding to the COVID 19 pandemic. And one of the key responses was to, you know, print money to stimulate the economy. And as a result, it caused inflation. And then people were looking to mitigate the effects of this by buying assets like your cryptocurrencies and like bitcoin. And on top of this, we're starting to see the technology mature, get more market penetration, more adoption. And that means more people are using it for things like remittances, which basically means for transferring money around and using it instead of banking. You know, so many people around the world don't have access to, you know, traditional banking rails, and, for example, more and more people in places like Turkey are using the technology in substitute of using your legacy financial systems. Probably the third thing I might touch on is the rapid innovation and the flywheel of innovation. You know, we're seeing a ridiculous amount of money from venture capital firms come into the space, just fuelling growth of all sorts of projects, which is building better products for more people, which is, you know, fascinating to watch. 

Tracey: [00:05:50] When you line up those factors, Blake mentions, it becomes a pretty hard sell on why you'd save cash, you know, I think this, coupled with the access to investing, is just getting so much more easier. Particularly the access to yielding stablecoins, even as an alternative to saving cash is becoming a lot easier. And I think not even just crypto, you know, crypto the share market. Gold and silver. I think all of these new investors are looking for a hedge. And I think, you know, that trend of new investors entering the market will continue to rise in 2022.

Blake: [00:06:28] And it might be a good time to point out that it's not just the retail investors that stimulating growth in the marketplace. You we see a lot of big financial institutions entering the space, and we're going to continue to see that in 2022. 

Tracey: [00:06:45] And over this last year, we've heard the term Web3 really come to prominence and we've spoken about Web3 in the last few episodes. So this is definitely going to be another big narrative for 2020, boys. What are your thoughts here? 

Blake: [00:07:00] It's fascinating, actually, because we're seeing so much product development, so much investment in this space. And I think it's a lot sexier than, you know, the word crypto or blockchain. People can understand that the internet is evolving and blockchain is a part of that. But it's not just that, you know, there's many other elements to it. So I think certainly it's going to be a massive theme next year. 

Craig: [00:07:24] I think with Web3, you know, and I wonder which coins in which projects will actually be the ones that win. And I think, you know, the one that comes to mind is Etherum. But I wonder which other games and projects are the ones that sort of it's really up in the air. I think we're a lot earlier than we all think on Web3. 

Tracey: [00:07:45] Yeah. Well, it's just so huge here. Well, what do we all think about the NFT market? We touched on it earlier when we opened the episode, but do you think that there's a little bit of a bubble to it? Where do you think you're our resident bubble NFT boy? Craig, what are your thoughts? 

Craig: [00:08:00] Yeah, I think when I saw someone buy a picture of a blade of grass for like two or three ETH, I thought we were in a bubble? I think it's a really good question because I think we saw this in 2017. And if you went around in 2017, a lot of things went crazy and a lot of things came back down. But you got the winners from 2017, you got the Ethereums, you got these projects that did come down 90 percent, but they came back big time. Will we see that? And then NFTs, I think probably. Though I think NFT profile picture tokens that don't really have utility might be the ones that sort of get washed out and there. And I think the NFT is around gaming and you're AXIE fairies that Blake's got, I've got, those sort of NFTs might come to prominence a bit more. 

Tracey: [00:08:49] No, I'm with you on that. And I've been doing a fair bit of research on the NFT space, and I think I think you're right there. And for me, I've had a lot of friends messaging been hitting me up the last few months about NFTs and even before it was about certain crypto coins. So I think this is still got a long way to play out and I think 2022 is still going to be the year of the NFT. But I think a lot of those ones that you mentioned earlier that were just a lot of them that will fall flat. But I think the downside here from this market will be the scaling solutions and they're bridging. It's got to get a lot easier for the everyday people to be able to jump into this market and to navigate their way around. So I think that there needs to be some, some improvements that happen there. Can we move on a little bit to the Metaverse, because I think this is worth noting for 2022, so crypto metaverses such as Decentraland will continue to be the big winners for the next 12 months. But I think they will eventually be beat out by the Big Tech metaverses like Meta, eventually, because Meta is investing $10 billion per year. So I will assume that they'll have some success in the future, but really, we have no idea what that will look like in 2022. So 2022, I'm still saying that the likes of Decentraland and the crypto metaverse will do well. You guys agree? 

Craig: [00:10:12] Yeah, I think so. But I think the metaverse when when I hear that, obviously there's Decentraland, there's Sandbox. But also there's AXIE, there's StarAtlas, there's all these games that are going to come out next year. Mm-Hmm. Now, you know, the play to earn space in the Metaverse is worth twenty five billion. So where do you think that could go Tracey next year? I reckon maybe if if Star Atlas, another Axie come out, you know, that could go to 100 billion next year, potentially. 

Tracey: [00:10:41] Nothing was surprising me with gaming, to be honest. So could do. Like, do you want to give us some predictions on the actual crypto market? What are your thoughts for say you know, the blue chips like BTC and ETH? 

Blake: [00:10:51] Yeah I think we're going to see continued adoption from institutions gaining exposure to to bitcoin. And similarly, with Ethereum, I think, you know, Ethereum's going to have a massive network upgrade in the middle of 2022, which will, you know, people have been waiting on for for many years and this is going to reduce transaction costs and increase its efficiency around, you know, energy consumption. And I think if Ethereum can solve some of the scaling solutions in 2022, it's going to be pretty tough going for some of the Ethereum killers like Solana and. 

Tracey: [00:11:29] But will it though, I mean, they've been saying this for years, will it ever actually scale properly? 

Tracey: [00:11:34] Is it in the middle of the year saying that they upgrade kind of the middle of the year? Is that is that kind of pie in the sky or is that? 

Blake: [00:11:40] Well, I think as far as I know, it's on track to launch, you know, in April. But of course, if it doesn't and it gets pushed back, then there'd be a lot of critics. 

Tracey: [00:11:52] All right. Well, let's let's kind of round things out by doing. Let's have a little bit of fun with this and go for a few predictions each and a couple of coins each for what we think might do well if we see a continued bull market for the next few months. Does everyone want to give one or two coins? Not financial advice, obviously, but a couple of coins that you like the look of that you think would do well over the coming months.

Craig: [00:12:16] I'll be a bit boring here, but my bold prediction for 2020 to is that Ethereum market cap will flip bitcoin market cap. I don't think it will be for long. I think it'll be like a peak Bull market craziness where Ethereum takes the top spot, maybe for two weeks. And the reason I say that Tracy is because NFT is DeFi. These games, you know, you all need Ethereum to participate in all the best projects. So is that demand going to, you know, push Ethereum to top spot? 

Tracey: [00:12:52] I don't see it happening. And if it does it, I think it will be very short-lived. You know, you don't have big Ethereum fan on it. Don't. I think if we have a bull run bitcoin will go with it and I think I just don't see it happening. 

Craig: [00:13:04] Yeah. Fair enough. Now the second prediction I've got that's a little bit more safer is I expect to play to earn gaming space to grow significantly. I think as more games get released like Star Atlas and there's a bunch of others that are trying to do what Axie's done. And I think, you know, the players and the gamers will all flock to the new games. And, you know, it's currently sitting at twenty five billion, the play to earn space on CoinGecko, and I don't expect anything I'm not a financial advisor, but my bold prediction could be that it could reach 100 billion, which would be a 5X. And now my third prediction, which is my most specky prediction, is a coin called DPX, and it's a decentralised options exchange. I think that will be a top performer. I do have some. So you don't know it's not gospel, but it's decentralised options exchange. And you know, we saw the rise of Uniswap and SushiSwap as decentralised exchanges in the last few years. And I expect this trend to go over to the options market. So those are my three main predictions. All right.

Tracey: [00:14:13] That's three from Craig Blake. What about you? You got one or two or three predictions for us? 

Blake: [00:14:18] Yeah, my predictions are pretty vanilla. I think we're going to see continued interest in DeFi from institutions with, you know, lots more money flowing into that space. I think as we see some of the larger gaming companies and some of the larger gaming projects building out their ecosystems we're going to see, you know, a lot of adoption in that space. And I also hope that a Ethereum can solve some of its scaling issues because, you know, it's going to allow a lot more people to access certain parts of the marketplace, which currently, you know, are too expensive for people to participate in. 

Tracey: [00:14:54] Okay. Thanks, Blake. And just to round it out I'm going to give you three of my favourite coins. You shouldn't have favourite children, but I do, and I have three favourite coins, too. So I'll make it really short and sharp. But I'm going to give you the ATOM, Cosmos because I think it'll become extremely important to have interoperability to the future of crypto. So ATOM, Cosmos. 

Blake: [00:15:14] Tracy, what is interoperability?

Tracey: [00:15:16] So all of them can talk to each other. So basically Cosmos, Polkadot, Ethereum, all of those will be able to talk to each other. So basically, if you've got something on Solana, you'll be able to send it to Cosmos and you'll be able to send it to Polkadot. So Atom will be the only one that can link them all together. It's the only one that's going towards doing that. The other coin is Terra, which is Luna, which is an algorithmic stablecoin which offers a payment processing solution. And my third coin is AVAX or Avalanche, which we covered a few episodes ago and we talked about the fundamentals so you can go back and listen to that one if you want a bit more information. But those three coins are the ones likely to look all for next year that we can come back and see how successful those were later next year. And I think we'll leave it there for today. But how about you guys? Send us your bold prediction for 2022? We'd love to see those come into the inbox, and we're still keen to know what you would like to ask us about crypto. Send us an email at podcast at Get Bamboo Dot Bio or follow us on social media and get in touch. All of those details are in the show notes below, and don't forget to write and review us in your podcast app, and that's it for another episode of crypto. Curious? Thanks so much for joining us. I'm Tracy. 

Blake: [00:16:41] I'm Blake.

Craig: [00:16:42] I'm Craig. Cheers, guys.

Tracey: [00:16:43] See you later!