BENGALURU: The world’s largest cryptocurrency Bitcoin was trading above $47,000 on January 1, 2022, from its all-time high of over $68,000 in November 2021, and just when the crypto industry was expecting a bullrun in 2022, it came crashing and falling below $16,000 in November 2022.
After Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX crypto exchange’s collapse, the future of crypto remains uncertain, but experts say the bear market will soon come to an end. “2022 wiped out a notional wealth of $2 trillion from the marketcap of crypto assets. Events like failure of Luna and collapse of exchanges including FTX, Celcius, Three Arrows, Vauld jolted the investors’ confidence.
This coupled with rising inflation, hawkish central bank and interest rate hikes dented sentiments for riskier assets including cryptos,” said Dileep Seinberg, founder and CEO, MuffinPay, Crypto NeoBank. One of the highlights of this year was completion of The Merge, which is technical upgrade of Ethereum. The year also saw a major sell-off with the new crypto rule that includes 30% tax and 1% TDS on virtual digital assets.
After the Terra crash and FTX collapse, many crypto exchanges in India started releasing transparency reports to gain investors’ confidence. In its third edition of transparency report in November, WazirX said over 700 accounts were blocked in April-September 2022 period and majority of the accounts blocked were due to requests that came in from users.
The bear market of 2022 will spill over the early months of 2023, experts say. “There will be a rise in decentralised applications and the adoption of distributed ledger technology in public and private sectors,” said Rajagopal Menon, vice-President at WazirX.
