Blog
CCData's 2022 Year in Review blog focuses on a tumultuous year for digital assets, marked by major events like the Terra Luna and FTX collapses. The blog reviews CCData's contributions and key events, including the successful CCDAS summit, and explores market shifts and advancements in exchange benchmarks.
2022 was an unprecedented year for digital assets, with major headwinds and severe idiosyncratic events dictating the narratives of the industry, including the collapse of Terra Luna, FTX and more.
Join us as we analyse the key events of the last year through our award-winning research, reflect on key highlights for CCData, our predictions for 2023 and more.
Contents:
In March, we welcomed both the traditional finance and digital asset community back to London for our event CCDAS, Europe’s flagship institutional event for digital assets. The event was a huge success, bringing together key institutional players and leading names in finance who are adopting and embracing the digital asset revolution.
In 2022, CCDAS had:
Watch the industry-shaping discussions from this year’s CCDAS.
Attendees had the opportunity to learn from thought leaders in the space, network and partake in panels covering a wide range of topics and issues facing the digital asset industry, including regulatory concerns, technical innovations and more.
It’s been a successful year for CCData and our partners, both old and new. From strengthening existing relationships with long-standing partners such as MarketVector Indices to establishing new collaborations with a wide range of organisations from Blockdaemon to SIX and the Financial Times.
CCData partnered with SIX, Switzerland’s principal stock exchange, to provide its clients with access to real-time and historical pricing data, order book data, and cryptocurrency derivatives data built on our proprietary aggregate pricing methodology.
CCData partnered with Blockdaemon to develop the Staking Yield Index Family — a collection of industry-first, regulated staking yield indices that allows institutional users to get streamlined exposure to staking yield.
We pledged our commitment to advancing the integrity of the digital asset markets by joining the Crypto Market Integrity Coalition. CCData was proud to join as a founding member alongside Coinbase, Circle, Anchorage Digital, Bitstamp, Crypto UK and more.
We were delighted to collaborate with the Financial Times and Wilshire, providing our market-leading data to power the FT Digital Asset Dashboard. The dashboard acts as a hub for FT readers to gain insight and access to institutional-grade data surrounding the digital asset markets. You can try it for yourself here:
CCData’s award-winning research has kept market participants informed and up to date with the latest developments, through what has been an unprecedented year for the digital asset industry.
Below are some of the major developments we have covered this year:
The collapse of the Terra ecosystem in May was one of the most catastrophic events in crypto’s history — comparable to the collapse of Mt. Gox in 2014 and the sharp market crashes that occurred in January 2018 and March 2020. The cause of the event and the immediate aftermath was covered in our UST Fall From Grace report, shedding light on UST’s peg falling to a low of $0.071 within 5 days of depegging, and LUNA’s market capitalisation collapsing from $41.2bn to $6.6mn, the largest destruction of wealth in this amount of time in a single project in crypto’s history.
CCData’s research provided insights into the state of competing stablecoins, such as USDT, USDC, and DAI, and assessed how their standings within the ecosystem changed following the fall of UST.
On September 15, the Ethereum blockchain finalised its transition to Proof of Stake, dubbed ‘The Merge’. This event was the culmination of 8 years’ worth of research, setbacks, and developments. The time leading up to the merge was characterised by much market speculation on Ether and the assets within the Ethereum ecosystem, which we analysed on our Market Spotlight blog.
Ether failed to capitalise on the Merge, as it became the worst performer in our September Asset Report, with the event proving to be a ‘buy the rumour, sell the news event.
On November 11, FTX Group announced that the exchange and an additional 130 associated companies, including FTX.US and Alameda Research, had filed for bankruptcy protection after failing to secure a bailout from potential investors.
Our Market Spotlight blog provided an in-depth analysis of the events and how they affected the markets in the days before and after the bankruptcy. FTX recorded net flows of -19,947 BTC on November 7, the largest net outflows since September 10, 2021. The stablecoin reserves on FTX also declined 42.6% to $171mn on the 6th of November, recording the lowest level since November 2021. The full contagion effects of the collapse of the FTX ecosystem have yet to be felt, but we will continue to analyse the impact through our research reports and blogs.
The market share of centralised exchanges has been increasingly concentrated among a few top players this year. In October, our Exchange Review highlighted the growth of Binance’s market share since the start of 2020, growing from less than 10% to 42% in October 2022. Before the collapse of FTX, the top 10 exchanges by market share controlled 76.3%, holding somewhat of an oligopoly.
2022 was a turbulent year full of events that will play an important role in shaping the future of the digital asset industry. In our view, 2023 will see some of these outcomes play out:
First, we believe there is a high probability of increased regulatory clarity — following the collapse of FTX, it is likely that regulators will finally approve a legislative framework for the industry. We hope this includes differentiation between centralised and decentralised entities within the crypto space to allow for continued innovation in the latter field. Having said this — regulators have not been proactive in the past, so we will potentially receive no further regulatory clarity in 2023.
Second, the contagion from the collapse of FTX will continue into the new year, with protocols and projects focusing on survival through cash preservation and on building applications with market-product fit, rather than on marketing and copy-cat initiatives. The table below includes a number of entities that had heavy exposure to FTX and Alameda Research.
Third, we expect the macroeconomic environment to improve in the latter stages of the year, which may be the trigger for short-term price increases in crypto markets. However, with the newfound fears on the asset class following the collapse of FTX, we do not expect a significant market recovery to take place any time soon, but rather, prices will be range bound while developers continue to build in anticipation of further adoption.
In 2022 we saw the end of the bull market and the start of a bear cycle, which provides market participants with an opportunity to take a step back, reflect on the developments of the industry and plan for the future. We are excited to continue to provide insights on digital assets and will provide further analysis on our expectations for the industry in our more detailed 2023 Outlook, to be released in January 2023.
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Disclaimer: Please note that the content of this blog post was created prior to our company's rebranding from CryptoCompare to CCData.
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