In 2022, the overall performance of Bitcoin remained sluggish, with significant declines in price and trading volume compared to 2021. The price trend of Bitcoin throughout the year is obviously influenced by the pace of US interest rate hikes, but as the US interest rate hike policy continues to advance, its impact on the price of bitcoin is gradually diminished.
ETH’s TVL reached $980 billion on January and gradually trended downward, hitting the bottom in July. L2’s gas fee increased. Optimism topped every other Layer2 network in terms of the gas fee income mainly because it announced the issuance of native coins.
The stablecoin market as a whole was stable in 2022. throughout the year, the supply of stablecoins fell from $157 billion to $148 billion, a 6% drop. USDT maintained its dominance, while BUSD is growing rapidly on Binance's back. Algorithmic stablecoins were hit hard by the fall of LUNA.
Public chains remained a competitive sector. Due to the overflow of demand caused by the congestion of the Ethereum network, the new public chain with low fees maintained a bright performance before May. However, as various bad news brewed and fermented, many public chains were greatly impacted, and the decline was even worse than that of Ethereum.
The NFT sector declined after its initial boom. In April, the market cap of the NFT reached $4.15 billion, a historic high; In May, driven by the boom of Otherside.
DeFi’s TVL also trended downward in 2022. In particular, during the LUNA/UST meltdown in May, mainstream coins witnessed the most spectacular crash in the history of cryptocurrencies, which was followed by a TVL collapse. Additionally, over the year, DeFi also suffered frequent hacks, which raised security concerns for DeFi.
SocialFi still managed to present us with a number of star projects, including Web3 lifestyle app STEPN featuring SocialFi elements, credential network Galxe, BNB Chain domain name service SPACE ID, social graph Lens Protocol, and Web3 gamified social learning platform Hooked Protocol.
2022 was also the beginning of the GameFi bear. There was no significant innovation in P2E blockchain game model. As the growth of users and trading volumes dwindled, institutional investors looked away from the P2E model. Top projects occupy high shares across chains, yet there are also a large number of projects with poor interaction, few users and low transaction volumes.
2022 was full of ups and downs, but regulations are headed in the right direction. the bankruptcy of Terra and FTX, two top cryptocurrency projects, prompted national regulators and law enforcement agencies to further enhance their cryptocurrency oversight and investigations.

2022 Crypto Annual Report