8 future trends in the cryptocurrency market
In 2021, the evolution of the crypto market is very eye-catching-Bitcoin is recognized by institutional investors; the rise of many new public chains continues to challenge the dominance of Ethereum; ADA, SOL, LUNA and other projects continue to set new historical highs regardless of market trends; NFT Once the market has detonated again, cryptocurrency has taken another important step towards mass popularization. This article will analyze 8 major trends in the current crypto industry, hoping to inspire investors.
1. The rise of the market value of cryptocurrencies and the prosperity of altcoins
In April 2021, driven by the strong price increase of Bitcoin and Ethereum, the total market value of cryptocurrencies exceeded US$2 trillion for the first time. After several months of adjustments, the current total market value of cryptocurrencies has returned to the $2 trillion mark. For investors who are still at a disadvantage, this period may be an excellent opportunity to deploy low-end high-quality altcoins.
2. Bitcoin gains multiple momentum
Starting from the first quarter of 2021, Bitcoin has repeatedly set new highs. Despite the sharp retracement after May, the annual growth rate of Bitcoin is still as high as 64% so far. The main drivers of its price strength are as follows:
Bitcoin ETFs in Canada, Brazil, and other countries have introduced additional investment tools for institutional and retail investors.
Institutional investors and listed companies buy Bitcoin as an asset to hedge against inflation. The number of bitcoins held by listed companies is close to 210,000, accounting for about 1% of the total supply. The Coinbase trading platform successfully completed the IPO, allowing investors in the United States and other countries to further accept the cryptocurrency market.
El Salvador became the first sovereign country to use Bitcoin as a legal tender, bringing more imagination to the adoption of Bitcoin.
Visa, Mastercard and PayPal promote the adoption of cryptocurrencies and support crypto payments.
Global inflation has increased. Take the United States as an example. In the past six months, the amount of additional currency issued by the Federal Reserve accounted for two-thirds of the total amount of additional issuance in the past 11 years.
The above factors have led to the continued growth of market demand for Bitcoin. On the other hand, on the supply side of Bitcoin, the upper limit is only 21 million (millions of which have been permanently lost), and the relationship between supply and demand tilts to the demand side, which will become the main logic to promote the rise of Bitcoin.
3. DeFi's market value growth and the rise of DEX
Since the beginning of this year, the total market value of DeFi projects has increased by 382%, setting a record high of US$95.7 billion. The DeFi sector broke out in the first quarter. The supply of stablecoins on the Ethereum chain has almost doubled, DEX transaction volume has increased by 2.5 times, and total borrowing has increased by 3 times. DEX native tokens account for about 50% of the total market value of the DeFi sector, and the three major DEX tokens UNI, SUSHI, and CAKE have all achieved substantial growth.
As of August 20, the total lock-in value (TVL) of the DeFi agreement reached US$151.1 billion (close to the level before the May crash). In other words, DeFi has shown strong resilience and sustainability after experiencing the test of the collapse of currency prices.
4. Multi-chain encryption world
The multi-chain paradigm continues to prevail. Although Ethereum is still the king of application public chains, many projects are trying to avoid the rising cost of the Ethereum network and explore alternative solutions and new audiences.
Projects such as SushiSwap, Tether and bZx are entering the Avalanche ecosystem.
Some new projects are preparing to be released on Polkadot.
The ecology of new public chains such as Fantom and Solana is growing.
As projects that can achieve interoperability and free flow of liquidity in multiple blockchains will continue to grow and gain more users, the multi-chain nature of projects may become the future trend of blockchain technology.
5.BSC drains the Ethereum market
In the first quarter of 2021, Binance Smart Chain (BSC) became the second most active blockchain, with the number of users increasing by 61%. The number of BSC active wallets alone has increased by 50% from last month, and the average number of unique active wallets per day has reached 105,000. BSC's native token, BNB, once became the third-ranked cryptocurrency by market capitalization.
Although BSC is more centralized than Ethereum, its ecosystem is still evolving and expanding relying on platform traffic and influence. Before Ethereum 2.0 is fully realized, the low-cost public chain represented by BSC is still one of the main channels for small retail investors to participate in DeFi and GameFi.
6. Ethereum expansion solution development
Due to the increasing global interest and demand for DeFi and cryptocurrencies, Ethereum's scalability and network congestion issues have also become a bottleneck for its development. In the case of strong demand, Ethereum Gas fees usually soar to more than 400%. In response to this problem, Ethereum introduced a Layer 2 solution. There are currently four main expansion plans: Optimism, Polygon, ZKRollup and xDAI.
• Projects such as Uniswap and Synthetix chose Optimism.
• Mainstream NFT markets such as OpenSea and Decentraland chose to migrate to Polygon.
• Balancer and Curve are working on the ZKRollup solution.
• xDAI has become the choice for small projects.
Looking to the future, each project must consider the technical characteristics of the existing two-tier solution and the services based on the solution. Many new projects may follow Uniswap and Synthetix to ensure that they stay connected with high-liquidity and mainstream projects.
7. NFT is booming
In 2021, the NFT field will achieve explosive growth, with a total market value of 27.9 billion US dollars, which has accounted for 10% of the global art market sales. NFT's sales mainly come from collections and artworks, such as Cryptopunk, Hashmasks, Beeple, etc. The second largest sales came from sports, such as NBATop Shot and ToppsMLB. A significant portion of sales comes from NFT games, such as AxieInfinity, and platform-based games, such as Enjin and Ultra. The sales of the meta universe category accounted for 8% of NFT's total sales (meta universe is another digital real world where people can play, work, and buy goods).
It is undeniable that there is a certain degree of bubble in NFT, but the market's interest in NFT will not disappear soon. Famous musicians, artists and athletes have all joined this craze. In addition, people are selling NFT artwork for charity. For any blockchain project that wants to stand out, future NFT-related features or service functions may become standard.
In the past two weeks, NFT sales have soared, far surpassing the March NFT boom. Last week’s largest NFT platform OpenSea’s sales reached a peak of more than 60,000 transactions per day, which is close to 8 times the peak in March. The transaction volume in August has exceeded $1 billion, and the number of daily independent buyers has also hit a record high.
8. The foundation of Ethereum is comprehensively improved
Let's first take a look at how NFT affects the price of Ethereum.
Since NFTs are usually priced in ETH, if the price of ETH suddenly rises, investors new to the NFT market may face soaring purchase costs. For example, an NFT priced at 2 ETH will suddenly rise from a cost of approximately US$4,000 to US$6,000 in a short period of time. This is not friendly to potential buyers who do not yet own ETH and need to use fiat currency to buy the cryptocurrency market.
But there is also some reflexivity between the NFT market and the price of ETH. People buy ETH to buy NFT, then sell NFT to get more ETH, and then they may buy back more NFT. The high sales volume of NFT has brought new attention to ETH, which will help bring more users into the Ethereum ecosystem.
Since the introduction of the basic fee burning mechanism in Ethereum EIP1559, more than 66,500 ETH have been destroyed. Among the applications that have contributed the most to the destruction, NFT-related applications such as OpenSea, AxieInfinity, Cyber​​KongzVX have burned more than 14,000 ETH, pushing up the price of ETH.
Judging from the recent changes in the ETH2.0 recharge data, the 2.0 contract address has already recharged a large amount of ETH. As shown in the figure above, the number of new depositors has not changed much, and the number of new ETH has increased significantly. It can be inferred that a large amount of ETH has been deposited into the 2.0 contract address recently because of the giant whale. This behavior can be explained as the belief that the long-term value of ETH will be much higher than $3,000.
In summary, NFT, DeFi protocol, and ETH2.0 pledge are all continuously absorbing the liquidity supply of ETH. Coupled with the continuous burning of basic handling fees, after the market picks up, ETH will continue to rise due to increasingly tight trading liquidity.














