2022 was supposed to be the period when the entire crypto ecosystem went completely mainstream. And interestingly, a significant chunk of the traditionalist venture capital firms had been betting heavily on this industry to prosper in 2021. However, as it turned out, the entire industry was constantly shaken by one disaster after another, and the previous year did turn out to be a cataclysmic year for the nascent crypto sector.
Some of the biggest names that had been thought to be pivotal in taking the industry to the next step turned out to be some of the orchestrators as the crypto industry went through a shock period that lasted a whole year. But, it would be a disservice if the protagonists were to be buried amidst the villains. There were a few winners who did, in fact, manage to take the sector to a respectable position.
The Winners and the Losers in the Crypto Ecosystem In 2022
Some of the biggest winners in the crypto ecosystem of 2022 were hardware wallet providers like Trezor and Ledger, who benefitted quite heavily as the crypto investors lost their trust in most of the centralized exchanges in the rubble of the collapse of the FTX.
Another category of winners came in the form of the White Hat hackers, who managed to retrieve millions of dollars in stolen funds and constantly flagged the security bugs that had been leading to more exploits throughout the sphere. Immunefi, a security service provider, also claimed that they had prevented the theft of around $20 billion worth of crypto through the bug bounty program for the hackers.
More than the winners, it was the losers who got the most attention from the crypto ecosystem this year. The flawed design of the TerraUSD, which was also aided by the reckless attitude of Kwon, led to the downfall of this stablecoin. The failure of the native stablecoin did lead to regulators warning against their application. The fall of Alameda and FTX- under SBF- did create a lot more contagion in the crypto ecosystem, while single-handedly erasing the trust that investors had in centralized exchanges.
