2022 was likely the worst year in crypto's short lifetime.

• $64m stolen in December was the smallest amount ALL YEAR
• Terra meltdown beat market cap down from $1.6bn to $1.2bn
• Tornado Cash sanctioned
• FTX worsened crypto's already poor reputation and caused even more market turmoil
• BTC down 65% YTD

What lessons can we learn?

If it's too good to be true, it is.

This was proven by Anchor, Terra's ponzi scheme UST farmer. It roped users into depositing their UST stablecoin for astronomically high yield rates. Anchor, being a smart contract, locked the depositors UST for an uncertain amount of time (in which it depegged to $0.04, making their coins worthless).

Not your keys, not your coins.

FTX, Celsius, Voyager, BlockFi, and many others proved this. If you're still holding your coins on exchanges during such an uncertain market, you might as well send all your crypto to a burn address.

Federal governments are noticing crypto.

This was evident from the sanctions on Tornado Cash, Binance's pauses on XMR withdrawals, and the (kinda) quick response to SBF and his self-snitching interviews. Regulation is coming, whether we like it or not.

Was it all bad?

No! There were a bunch of high points in 2022, like Ethereum's merge, Cardano's 'Vasil' fork, and advancements in zero-knowledge tech. zkSync released the first EVM-compatible zk-SNARK in an alpha stage, paving the way for fast, secure, and cheap transactions on Ethereum.

There were an amazing amount of advancements in other projects, but there would be too many to list here.

Overall, 2022 was a horrible year for crypto in terms of market value. In R&D though, projects advanced significantly to deliver a smoother experience for their users.

Here's to hoping 2023 will be better! Cheers!