CoinGecko has published its Yearly Report 2020 on the crypto sector.
It is a comprehensive analysis of the market and the key dynamics that shaped it last year.
CoinGecko describes 2020 as an “exhilarating” and “exciting” year for the crypto sector, and suggests that 2021 could be just as exciting.
2020 was marked by the beginning of the massive entry of institutional investors into this market, such as Square and MicroStrategy who started embracing Bitcoin as part of their hedging strategies.
According to CoinGecko’s calculations, institutional investors would now hold a total of about 1,172,065 bitcoin, or almost 6% of all existing BTC in the world.
But the year was also marked by the rise of decentralized finance (DeFi), which saw the emergence of new protocols and a TVL that skyrocketed to several billion dollars. Unfortunately, however, this growing popularity also attracted the attention of many malicious actors who caused total losses of around $121 million.
It has also seen several airdrops, such as those of Uniswap, 1inch, The Graph and many others.
The 5 points of the report on the crypto sector in 2020
According to CoinGecko’s report, there were five highlights of 2020 for crypto markets.
The first concerns the total market capitalization of the 30 largest cryptocurrencies, which closed the year at an all-time high of around $732 billion.
One of the main reasons for this growth would be the massive entry of institutional investors into this market, including Paul Tudor Jones and Stanley Druckenmiller.
The second relates to the bitcoin price rally which in some ways echoed that of late 2016 / early 2017.
During that cycle, it had eventually risen 4,527%, as of December 2017, while for now it has risen more than twice as much as it did in 2016. According to CoinGecko though, this time around the crypto market may be able to sustain high valuations.
Third was DeFi, which ended 2020 with the highest market capitalization ever, at $20.4 billion.
The fourth is the growth in trading volume on exchanges, which rose to $403 billion in 2020.
Finally, the fifth is the record volume for Bitcoin Perpetual Swap futures contracts, which rose to a new all-time high of $3.5 trillion.
2020 was therefore a year marked by several historical records in the crypto sector, besides that of the bitcoin price, with the numbers revealing a sector that is experiencing tremendous growth and expansion.
