The State Of Crypto In 2022

A16z is a venture capital firm led by Marc Andreessen, one of the most famous names in the technology industry. They have bet BIG on crypto and web3, and earlier this week, they came out with a report about the State of Crypto right now. 

It is 58 pages long, but totally worth your time, and to be fair, the pretty pictures and graphics took up a lot of space.

Here is a tl;dr summary of the report, which you can access here.

If we put the market cycles to one side, the long term trends look good

Ethereum is not the only blockchain in town

When it comes to the number of addresses and transactions on the network, other blockchains are catching up to and surpassing Ethereum. 

For developers though, Ethereum is the only blockchain in town

HOWEVER, you can see that other ecosystems like Solana are on a similar trajectory. They just haven’t been around long enough to see the kind of adoption the Ethereum network is seeing. 

There are still a huge number of people that can benefit from the DeFi boom

There are still 1.7 billion people who do not have access to bank accounts and of these, 1 billion have a mobile phone and 480 million have access to the internet. DeFi has the potential to change the lives of some of these people. 

NFTs are changing the game for creators

These are the revenue per creator on different platforms.OpenSea is a platform used to sell and trade NFTs, and a16z compared earnings on OpenSea to earnings on equivalent web2.0 platforms widely used by creators. Here are the results:

Facebook: $0.10 per user

Spotify: $636 per artist

Youtube: $2.47 per channel

OpenSea: $174,000 per creator

We’re still in the early days of web3

Web3 is following a very similar trajectory (when it comes to adoption) to the internet in the 90s. Currently, levels of adoption in web3 are roughly equivalent to the level of adoption of the internet in 1995. If web3 continues following the same trajectory as web2, we have a long way to go. 

Onwards & Upwards

a16z expects many more creators to embrace NFTs, once they realise how lucrative this route could be for them. They also expect a lot of development in the web3 gaming space. They think that the new users coming in from these two channels will earn tokens, and will be willing to store and exchange these tokens using DeFi protocols. According to a16z at least, the future looks bright – bear market or otherwise.