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	Good Friday morning and happy New Year's Eve! Billy Bambrough here with what's driving the crypto space into 2022 and beyond.


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1-year crypto market snapshot

$48,079

$3,788

$175.41

$0.1738

✨ A very big year


	This time last year, El Salvador hadn't begun its bitcoin odyssey, Tesla wasn't holding bitcoin, there was no U.S. bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF), the non-fungible token (NFT) market was almost nonexistent and litecoin was a top-ten coin. Today, litecoin is ranked 20th on CoinMarketCap, replaced by ethereum challengers Binance's BNB, solana, cardano and polkadot. Stablecoins, in high demand to meet an increase in crypto market participants, have proliferated. The combined crypto market value has increased from $700 billion to $2.2 trillion, making early investors overnight billionaires and sparking the second worldwide crypto gold rush after 2017's bitcoin boom introduced people around the world to digital assets. 2021 has quite simply been the biggest year yet for bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. However, progress on the fundamentals is lacking. It's been over a year since PayPal kicked off the bitcoin price rally to around $60,000 and Codex has yet to see any real sign of people using the platform for anything but speculation. NFTs and decentralized finance (DeFi) offer a compelling use case for crypto but are dependant on pending regulation and as yet untested technology. After a year of ground-breaking firsts, 2022 needs to offer more than just memecoin-style price speculation to finally prove the doubters wrong.

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	A sign wishing visitors a happy New Year at an airport in Wuhan, China Getty Images


	Doom and gloom: Despite the crypto market soaring, better than expected adoption on Wall Street, among corporations and at the national level, the mood among the crypto community is gloomy as 2021 draws to a close. Stock-to-flow fail: The bleak atmosphere that's settled over the crypto space was cemented this month by the apparent failure of the closely-watched stock-to-flow bitcoin pricing model. Created by pseudonymous Dutch analyst PlanB the model had predicted bitcoin would hit $100,000 by December 2021. Earlier this year PlanB said that if bitcoin was under $100,000 this month, the stock-to-flow model would be "off the rails," "invalidated," and "dead." Turns out, he meant that if the bitcoin price was in a range that includes its current price... convenient. Red flags everywhere: It's not just crypto markets that analysts are warning about. Earlier this month, a Wall Street veteran called the religious dedication to Tesla's Elon Musk, meme stock hype, and YOLO investing similar to a dot com-style pyramid scheme and predicted it will all soon come crashing down. The general consensus is that asset prices across the board are set for a full-on taper tantrum when the Federal Reserve is eventually forced into firmer action to tackle soaring inflation. Politico has a good historical primer. Away from market predictions... Prominent crypto exchange Coinbase, which became a publicly-traded company in 2021 though has seen its stock price plummet, has published a blog post titled "10 Predictions for web3 and the cryptoeconomy for 2022. As well as a lot of buzz words and vagary around existing concepts and technologies "becoming more mainstream," Surojit Chatterjee, Coinbase chief product officer, predicts Silicon Valley will follow Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook into the metaverse. Both Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey apparently disagree. Back to basics: One of the most concrete and notable predictions comes from The Information's Hannah Miller, who reckons two of the world's biggest retailers Walmart and Amazon will begin accepting crypto payments in 2022, pointing to job ads and widely discredited reports Amazon was rumored to be planning to accept bitcoin payments by the end of 2021 as well as developing its own digital currency. The bottom line: Even with all the surprise successes of 2021, most 2022 predictions are a continuation of the trends that have developed this year. Wall Street is still "coming," crypto payments are about to "go mainstream," everything is about to fall into place. The promised land is, as always, just around the corner. Now read this: Cryptocurrency Investing Predictions For 2022

SEC chair recruits crypto advisor 🤝

🧑‍🏫 Gary Gensler, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman who's a former MIT blockchain professor, has hired Corey Frayer as a cryptocurrency specialist advisor, according to an announcement.

📜 While a senior staffer on the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs under committee chairman senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Frayer spearheaded crypto policy for Brown, an anonymous source told Coindesk. Brown is a crypto critic and has spoken of his concerns about the risks cryptocurrencies could pose to investors, calling blockchain a "shady diffuse network of online funny money" at a hearing in July.

📶 The appointment queues up Gensler's goal of putting in place a U.S. regulatory framework for crypto next year and is a signal that the crypto space will be an SEC priority in 2022.

Now read this: El Salvador's leader loved by crypto faithful, but not by bondholders

	Billy Bambrough
	Forbes Senior Contributor

I am a journalist with significant experience covering technology, finance, economics, and business. I write about how bitcoin, crypto and blockchain can change the world.

Follow me on Twitter or email me.

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