The cryptocurrency and blockchain industry grew by leaps and premises in 2020. The top two assets, Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH), gained 303% and 469%, respectively, which can exist considered extraordinary in comparison with the 25% render of aureate. While the precious metal is often considered a safe-oasis asset, the two digital avails outperformed gold during the uncertain market scenarios that persisted due to the pandemic.

Joshua Frank, co-founder and CEO of The Tie — a firm providing crypto insights based on social media analytics — told Cointelegraph: "Across the largest 100 assets past market cap, the average cryptocurrency experienced an 87% increase in average tweet volume — with Bitcoin surging by 95%."

Frank added that even though this current rally is driven by institutional interest, retail interest seems to be rise as well. All this will ultimately lead to a rise in interest in altcoins: "Information technology is worth monitoring which mid-cap avails continue to see surging social activity as this is often a practiced leading indicator of price movement."

With the attention around crypto spiking against the backdrop of prices growing at such a rapid pace, there are lots of companies, projects and cryptocurrencies that gained momentum in 2020.

Bitcoin: The most important crypto asset

Bitcoin was, unsurprisingly, the most mentioned crypto asset in 2020, with a 95% year-on-year increase in Twitter mentions. The cost for 1 BTC rose from around the $vii,000 marking to striking an astonishing all-time high of almost $35,000 at the start of the yr.

BTC received a lot of attending from the mainstream media in 2020. Grayscale, MicroStrategy, Square and MassMutual heavily invested in BTC, and fifty-fifty corporate giants such as PayPal and JPMorgan Hunt began to invest to harnessing the opportunities that Bitcoin offers. John Todaro, managing director of research at TradeBlock — a provider of institutional trading tools for digital currencies — told Cointelegraph:

"For the first time, institutions are beginning to rush into the crypto ecosystem, with MicroStrategy, Square, MassMutual, and others leading the charge. All of these major institutions accept so far only allocated to bitcoin — as bitcoin is likely the strongest digital currency when it comes to an aggrandizement resistant digital aureate."

Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy, recently even took to Twitter to propose billionaire CEO Elon Musk to catechumen Tesla's remainder sheet from the U.Southward. dollar to BTC — all this among the third bull run Bitcoin saw in 2020. The bull run has continued into the new year's day and is expected to go on going for some time. Because that this is the beginning of mainstream and institutional interest in Bitcoin, 2021 promises to be an even bigger year for the nugget and blockchain technology as a whole.

Despite JPMorgan stating that Bitcoin is overbought, information technology volition withal continue to pull out capital from investors in gold; although, according to Goldman Sachs, both assets tin coexist. Todaro added: "You will likely also see more companies follow MicroStrategy'due south lead and put minor allocations of their treasury reserve into the asset. This all bodes well for bitcoin to encroach on Gold'due south market share."

Ethereum: The blockchain with the most use cases

Ethereum is a blockchain network that runs smart contracts and supports the biggest altcoin, Ether. The main use case of the network is to enable the exchange of value with no intervention from third parties. The network was conceived by developer Vitalik Buterin in 2013 to expand the employ instance of Bitcoin's engineering science, and it became officially active in 2015. In contrast to BTC, there is no hard cap on Ether, with the potential for an endless supply.

Ether showed promising improvements throughout the course of 2020. The spike in cost that is being seen in early 2021 is happening effectually the same time as BTC continues hitting new all-time highs, indicating the positive bear on of the enthusiasm of the crypto community. Apart from being a digital currency, Ether also acts equally fuel for decentralized applications that operate on the Ethereum network.

The two landmark moments for Ethereum in 2020 were the rise of decentralized finance and the launch of the Buoy Chain for Ethereum ii.0. DeFi markets saw enormous growth in 2020, with the total value locked ascension from $687 million at the first of the year to over $14 billion by the cease — further skyrocketing to over $18 billion as of Jan. four. This growth is generally attributed to the hype effectually liquidity mining and yield farming, forth with the apprehension around Ethereum 2.0 and rise of DeFi oracles.

As seen with the continual rise in total value locked in DeFi projects in the 2nd half of 2020, the TVL should continue to rise through 2021, and more use cases for DeFi should exist generated through various DApps. Todaro further commented on the importance of Ether to DeFi markets:

"You cannot talk virtually DeFi without talking well-nigh Ethereum. With the majority of DeFi projects built on Ethereum, ether has become the lifeblood of the ecosystem when transactions are soaring (as evidenced past the surge in eth gas costs during the DeFi bull run over the summer)."

Uniswap: The largest DEX

One of the top players in the DeFi domain in 2020 by total value locked was Uniswap, a decentralized exchange, or DEX. A DEX is a mode to substitution cryptocurrencies without a centralized governing agency enabling the transaction. Uniswap's token exchange uses liquidity pools guided by oracles instead of order books.

The exchange even airdropped its own token, UNI, to its users as a controversial response to SushiSwap's vampire mining attack. Uniswap'southward token saw the highest increase in tweet volume, reaching approximately 1,500 tweets per day.

The rivalry betwixt Uniswap and SushiSwap seems to have benefited both communities, as the total value locked in both protocols combined is just over $4 billion of the $18.63 billion locked as a whole, co-ordinate to DeFi Pulse. With regulations likely to tighten for centralized exchanges, DEX's are leap to see a further increment in new users as market place participants await to maintain their power to trade on noncustodial exchanges.

Chainlink: The DeFi oracle forerunner

In 2020, Chainlink became the nearly widely used oracle network for universally continued smart contracts, allowing blockchains to access real-globe data in a timely fashion. The Chainlink community is an open up-source community of data providers, node operators, smart contract developers, researchers and security auditors.

The customs has its own token, LINK, which is the cryptocurrency used by the network to pay for various operations involving data. LINK saw a 260% year-on-twelvemonth increase in Twitter mentions in 2020, according to Frank.

Chainlink announced partnerships with enormous entities like Google and the Chinese state-backed Blockchain-based Service Network. It was also tapped by Ethereum'due south blockchain rival Tezos to provide real-time information for its community projects. Due to the unique proposition that oracles provide for smart contracts to interact with real-fourth dimension data, the oracles domain should expand farther in 2021, seeing Chainlink and its competitors like Band Protocol and Compound fighting for market say-so.

Circle: The company behind the fastest-growing stablecoin

Circumvolve is the visitor that runs the 2d-largest dollar-pegged stablecoin by market capitalization, USD Coin (USDC) — which was the fastest-growing stablecoin of 2020. Its market capitalization grew multifold from effectually $500 one thousand thousand at the starting time of the year to $4 billion past the showtime of 2021. Circumvolve fifty-fifty collaborated with the Usa government on a "global foreign policy objective" in Venezuela where USDC was used to distribute relief funds to medical workers and Venezuelan locals.

In light of recent attention from U.South. federal regulators, stablecoins might merely exist the crypto community'south first real betoken of disharmonize with regulators. They could presently be regulated by what's at present dubbed the "STABLE Act," which intends to "protect consumers from the risks posed past emerging digital payment instruments, such equally Facebook'south Libra [Diem] and other Stablecoins."

The President's Working Group on Financial Markets even released a statement regarding the primal regulatory and supervisory issues relevant to "certain stablecoins." Todaro commented on what the implications of this increased regulatory attention could mean for stablecoins: "Stablecoins will likely see increased regulation in 2021. It is difficult to see how this shakes out, but USDC will likely become more than centralized than it currently is and will likely become closer related to a banking company than a decentralized consortium."

The trend continues into 2021

Although 2020 was a phenomenal twelvemonth for crypto, 2021 holds an even larger potential for the growth of the industry. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange will launch its Ether futures in February, which is bound to push button the markets further.

Frank farther opined that the Twitter metrics indicate an even larger involvement toward cryptocurrencies in 2021: "The surge in Twitter conversations has continued into and been even more than pronounced in the commencement week of 2021." He went on to add: "Today Ethereum's Tweet volume striking an all-fourth dimension high (doubling the previous record set in 2018) and two days ago both Bitcoin and the overall crypto market saw Tweet book all-time highs, besting marks set in 2017."