5 cult trends in the crypto market in 2021

It can be said that 2021 will be a particularly explosive year for the entire crypto market. Here are the five most influential trends across the market over the past 12 months.

Memecoins

After Memecoins had gained in importance in 2020 until the DeFi summer hit, they were the focus in 2021.

Unlike other trends, however, Memecoin appears to be powered by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla. TIME Magazine Person of the Year has made a significant contribution to raising people’s awareness of the King of Memecoin – Dogecoin.

Dogecoin (DOGE) may have started as a joke years ago, but now, with hundreds of thousands of HODLers, it’s one of the top crypto projects in the world and has one of the strongest communities. Additionally, with Musk’s support, Tesla’s DOGE can be accepted for some of its items.

The cryptocurrency is up nearly 4,000% so far but is trading 76% below ATH as of May.

Dogecoin has inspired the entire memecoin movement and one of the most vivid examples is Shiba Inu’s SHIB token.

SHIB calls itself “Dogecoin-Killer” and has developed into one of the most powerful cryptocurrencies of the year, with many stories from investors who invested only 100 US dollars a year ago and thus became rich a million times over. Although SHIB is currently trading 60% below ATH, the token price has increased 44,636,200% in the past 12 months.

In addition, Memecoins are a household name and a viable market positioning strategy. The rise of Doge and Shib shows that there is a separate product market for memecoins and many development teams have started looking for ways to create legitimate business platforms in this space.

NFT

NFT has been a leader in the crypto industry for quite some time. This is also one of the trends that is attracting a lot of new users in this field.

The reason for this dynamic may be that the NFT is not tied to complex economic models and attempts to circumvent monetary policy. For most people, NFTs are just fun, rare, verifiable representations of digital art.

One of the 9 Alien CryptoPunk was sold for $ 8 million

However, it is not that simple. The NFT bears the artist’s digital signature and cannot be copied, which essentially makes each NFT unique.

Perhaps the most influential story was the sale of Beeple’s The First 5,000 Days for a high price. This is a collection of 5,000 digital artworks that Mike Winkelmann (aka Beeple) created over 5,000 days. The work sold for $ 69 million at Christie’s auction, making it one of only three living artists whose artwork has been bought at the maximum price.

From CryptoPunk, Rock, Bored Apes Yacht Club, Rumble Kong and Hashmass to numbers on a white background, NFT is everywhere. What’s even more interesting is that this trend doesn’t seem to be slowing down. While retail investor interest in NFT has declined, the token is fundamental to the metaverse and play-to-earn model.

Play-to-Ear (P2E)

Blockchain and online gaming are two areas that have been going hand in hand for a long time. Over the years we’ve seen a few games based on distributed ledger technology, but nothing really worked out at that time.

However, that changed in 2021, and especially towards the end of the third and fourth quarters. It was Axie Infinity that led the market boom last year. One of its native tokens – AXS – rose from around $ 0.50 to hit an ATH of $ 160 in November. Currently, AXS is up nearly 17,000% in just the past 12 months, despite being tightened. The trade is much lower than the previous ATH. Additionally, not so long ago, a piece of land in the Axie Infinity universe was sold for $ 2.3 million.

AXS / USDT. Source: TradingView

P2E really took off after Facebook announced it would be renamed Meta and become the “big guy” in building Metaverse. The play-to-earn (P2E) space has exploded and is still a super hot topic right now.

Projects like The Sandbox and Decentraland made the top 50 and even surpassed Axie Infinity to become the biggest game project.

Nowadays it seems that the concept of Metaverse is all around us and the hype is real. Hundreds of development teams are fighting to create a blue chip blockchain game that will attract many players and become a leader in the market.

Binance Smart Chain Fever

If we saw DeFi summer on Ethereum last year, we see the same madness on Binance Smart Chain (BSC) this year.

The demand for decentralized applications soared that it clogged the Ethereum network. Many have to pay hundreds of dollars in transaction fees, making it virtually impossible for retail investors to get into the DeFi sector.

However, as the yield farming metagame grew in popularity, alternatives began to emerge with the aim of attracting all gamers looking for a transaction network with cheaper fees than Ethereum.

This is how the Binance Smart Chain stands out. By mid-February, the number of unique addresses at BSC had tripled. In March, the number of 24-hour transactions on PancakeSwap (the largest DEX on BSC) was higher than on the entire Ethereum network.

Number of unique addresses on BSC | Source: BSCScan

In April, the Total Value of Assets Locked on PancakeSwap (TVL) reached $ 5.5 billion, temporarily surpassing Uniswap’s TVL.

All projects built on Ethereum are suddenly recreated on BSC but it seems to be in vain. Most of these projects are now “dead” as the hype surrounding BSC subsides. Although the number of unique addresses continues to grow, it is still not as fast as it was in its earlier heyday.

This whole trend is one of the reasons Binance Coin (BNB) is also up over 1200% in the past 12 months.

Laser Eye: Bitcoin Rises to $ 100,000

Laser Eye is the Bitcoin focused trend and has seen a lot of hype in the past year as well. Basically, someone came up with the idea of ​​putting a laser eye on their Twitter profile picture and leaving it that way until the BTC price hits $ 100,000.

Cryptocurrency Community and Laser Eye Trends | Source: Twitter

Lots of people, including MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor and US Senator Cynthia Lummis, embraced the idea and made it one of the most popular trends of the year.

This trend didn’t last long, however, with Bitcoin price dropping around 50% shortly after it began, leading some to speculate that this hype could be a signal that BTC has topped.

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