Transaction counts were relatively stable throughout 2022, but have declined overall since the peak of the 2021 bull market.
Notably, Bitcoin’s transaction count has failed to surpass its peak from 2017.
2. Lightning Adoption
On the capacity front, Lightning had a good year.
Bitcoin on Lightning hit an all-time high of slightly more than 5k BTC ($82.5M) in Q4.
It declined shortly after, but held stable at around 4.8k BTC ($79.2M).
3. Miners
Recently, miners seem to be selling everything to keep their firms afloat.
Given that macro conditions have mostly remained the same, there’s no material reason to think this will change.
4. Energy Prices
Energy prices have skyrocket in 2022.
The increase in energy prices was horrible news for miners, as PoW is energy-intensive. This undoubtedly hurts the bottom line for mining companies.
5. HashRate/Difficulty
The HashRate/Difficulty of the Bitcoin network reached ATHs in 2022.
One can speculate that maybe Ethereum PoW miners shifted rack space to BTC mining, or maybe existing miners picked up heavily discounted ASICs from failed miners. Overall tough to tell.
There are interesting narratives to watch for bitcoin moving forward including:
- Taproot
- Taro, Lightning
- The African market
- zk-rollups on Bitcoin
Overall, the future does indeed seems bright...
But, our main concern is Bitcoin miners.
A decimated mining sector could potentially devastate Bitcoin’s security.
To learn more about Bitcoin's mining situation, follow us @Delphi_Digital and join the Telegram for an extra chart! We'll see you there 🤝
Yesterday we sent out our 2023 DeFi Report and it broke our DMs from the amount of demand. 🔥
To access the report, join our Telegram Channel and you'll see it immediately.
PS: Read the section on DeFi Blue Chips, extra important on a day like today. ⬇️ t.me/DelphiDigitalA…
The Year Ahead for DeFi covers our predictions, themes, challenges, and opportunities for DeFi in 2023.
Here you can find our Table of Contents that neatly breaks down what to expect in the 67-page report:
While DeFi has come far, obstacles remain:
1. DeFi products with traction are speculation-based 2. Onboarding new users is very difficult 3. Retaining users is even harder 4. Crypto UX is not good
The challenging end goal is self-sovereignty & a transparent, borderless system
1/ Most speculators don't know the differences that set apart Liquid Staking Derivatives (LSDs) competitors like @LidoFinance, @Rocket_Pool & @fraxfinance.
Let's take a look at the $ETH staking market from a business & financial perspective ⬇️🧵
Here is the 13 tweet report breakdown, simplified with charts & data: 👇🧵
DeFi was the golden child of 2020, acting as the first true narrative of the last market cycle.
Its initiation into the crypto mainstream has now endearingly gone down in history as “DeFi Summer.”
While DeFi has come far, obstacles remain:
1. DeFi products with traction are speculation-based 2. Onboarding new users is very difficult 3. Retaining users is even harder 4. Crypto UX is not good
The challenging end goal is self-sovereignty & a transparent, borderless system