👎 What was the worst in 2021?

There were many negative news in 2021 and lots of investors lost billions, what was the worst?

As a consultant and facilitator, the worst stories that I heard from our clients and students were those of Crypto scams. According to data from Chainalysis more than $7.7 billion was taken from victims in 2021 alone, an 81% increase on the year before. The scams that we have been more aware of are those ponzi like schemes were scammers trick victims into thinking that if they use their platform or wallet to invest in crypto and bring more clients, their returns will be above the industry standards. “Too good to be true,” but thousands have fallen for it and lots their life savings and more when this sites go completely off-line and the scammers disappear.

We always encourage to “DYOR” do your own research and make sure that the platforms, wallets, coins and/or protocols that you want to invest in are legit. Read about them, google them to see what results come up, learn about the founders and leaders, are the reachable on social media or other platforms with reputation? Are they listed on reputable? Do they provide access to your private keys or seed phrase? Where are the coins stored? Ask a lot of questions. Do not take anyone’s (not even your friends or family) word for it as they may be getting scammed as well and not even know it.

Cyber criminals are proliferating, getting extremely crafty, smart, and they have master this technology. Please be very careful.

On December 13th, the New Yorker published an article reporting several cases of crypto losses. Many of these losses were due to forgotten passwords, damage cold wallets, lost devices were crypto fortunes were stored, and other very interesting stories.

Today, of the existing 18.5 million Bitcoin, around 20 percent — currently worth around $140 billion — appears to be in lost or otherwise stranded wallets, according to Chainalysis. Wallet Recovery Services, a business that helps find lost digital keys, said it had received 70 requests a day from people who wanted help recovering their riches, three times the number of a month ago. This leads us to believe that the crypto custody industry is bound to have huge potential demands since it is easier to outsource the custody of our coins than to deal with losing millions due to losing passwords, crypto owners dying and taking wallet access to the grave, or damage wallets.

Some fake news have also affected the reputation of the industry and created many losses for those who fall for it. A press release came out in September that declared that Walmart was preparing to accept Litecoin as a payment method. Many investors rushed to load their wallets with Litecoin as the news hit the circle quite rapidly since it was reported by different news sites and even posted on Globe Newswire as well as Litecoin's verified Twitter accounts.

Walmart had to clarify that it was not accepting Litecoin as payment through its digital stores, but due to the fake Walmart news release, the price of Litecoin went up for a period of time before falling way below it original price.

This year China completely prohibited (for like the tenth time) the use, trade, and mining of cryptocurrencies. The news did not hit prices negatively as mush as it was expected, but created a shift in the mining industry that benefited the United States were many miners relocated to and also some neighboring Asian nations.

As a result, India has revisited its plans to heavily restrict the use of cryptocurrencies, but there is still a lot of skepticism and doubt with regards to the final plans that will affect the more that 20 million investors that currently exist in the country.

Overall, 2022 will be a very exciting year for the crypto world as it has already reached mainstream, so anything goes… Global institutional money is starting to pour in in the form of investments and to create new crypto related companies. But cyber crime will also increase and become more sophisticated and complicated to detect and punish, and we can also expect many more scams in the market that we are going to have to learn how to dodge in order to avoid permanent losses.

Nevertheless, despite all the losses and bad news, it will be a very exciting year for crypto, the NFT scene, and the development of the metaverse.

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👀 Under the Radar (The Interoperability Coins)

ICON (ICX) - is a layer-one blockchain from South Korea. Its declared vision is to build an interoperable blockchain network bridging autonomous online communities and real-world enterprises. ICON Network focuses on delivering real-world utility by advancing hyperconnectivity through the promotion of frictionless value exchanges.
Moonriver (MOVR) - is an Ethereum-compatible, smart-contract parachain on Kusama that will ship to Moonbeam on Polkadot. It allows to develop chains that can interoperate and communicate with each other. Moonriver requires the MOVR token to function.
Ontology (ONT) - A semi-Decentralized, proof-of-stake blockchain built on the NEO protocol. A high performance, open source blockchain specializing in digital identity and data. Ontology's unique infrastructure supports robust cross-chain collaboration and Layer 2 scalability, offering businesses the flexibility to design a blockchain that suits their needs.
RenBTC (renBTC) - Ren is an open protocol meant to enable the permissionless and private transfer of value between any blockchain. Ren’s core product, RenVM, is focused on bringing interoperability to decentralized finance (DeFi).
THORchain (Rune) - Built for cross-chain permissionless digital asset liquidity. Stake assets in liquidity pools to earn fees, swap assets instantly at open market prices, borrow and lend on any asset, and pay in any currency. THORChain does not compete with any existing protocol or chain. Rather it is built to connect them all in one massively liquid, redundant and decentralized network.

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