venture-capital-report-2021-overview

Venture Capital Report: 2021 Overview

March 2022 - Cointelegraph Research

Public Access
Keywords :
VC, Venture Capital, Deals, M&A, Funding, 2021

If you have been around the blockchain industry for some time, the 2021 volatility was not all surprising. What may have been surprising was the reduced overall market volatility compared to previous years. Much of this greater stability has to do with continued mainstream adoption and inflows of venture capital investment in different market sectors.

In 2021, the fast-growing sector was NFTs or non-fungible tokens. NFTs drove the likes of Nike to acquire companies to help market NFTs of sports action pictures: all on the blockchain. The Ethereum protocol dominated the NFT sector when NFTs were first on the scene. However, consistently high gas prices on Ethereum caused many to look elsewhere. Faster transactions times and extremely low transaction fees helped propel the Solana protocol in popularity (and brought the price from $6 in early January 2021 to just below $260 in November). That meteoric rise gave birth to the phrase “Solana Summer,” increasing interest in NFTs, and helped lift the rest of the alt-coin market.

Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal either started or increased their involvement in the industry throughout the year. Corporations like Microstrategy started to add cryptocurrency to their balance sheets. It seems almost daily there is a new deal, acquisition, project, or application, and the dynamics of the marketplace can be overwhelming.

Cointelegraph Research is committed to bringing insights from some of the most important venture capital investments, project participants, funding rounds, and mergers & acquisitions. By using the most up-to-date information and industry analysis, we present these reports to the reader to provide insights into the pace and heartbeats in the industry.