One of the leading crypto-asset price aggregator and analytics website CoinGecko released its yearly report a few days ago, highlighting the important developments and changes in the crypto-world, in the past year. The report is over 50 pages long. Here’s a summary of the most important facts and figures mentioned in it.
Macro Outlook of Crypto Industry – Market Dynamics
The report notes that both trading volume and market-cap were on upward trend, throughout the year 2019. Compared to last year, there was a 44.1% rise in the cryptocurrency market-cap and the trading volume increased by nearly 600%. Among top five coins, the average yearly return was +20.6%, with Bitcoin (BTC) being the best performer and Ripple (XRP) faring the worst.
Compared to other asset classes, Bitcoin was the best performer in all categories. Despite being highly volatile, the return on investment for BTC was 95% against S&P 500 at 29%, Gold at 19% and Silver at 15.6%. It is also worth noting that Bitcoin saw a 73% drop in value, in 2018. Bitcoin’s market dominance also increased from 56.3% to 71.5% (a gain of 15.2%) in the last year.
Altcoins showing strong price performance in 2019 were Binance Coin (BNB) gained 125%, ChainLink (LINK) gained 487%, Crypto.com Chain (CRO) gained 62%, Basic Attention Token (BAT) gained 38% and Huobi Token (HT) gained 159%.
Macro Outlook of Crypto Industry – Exchanges
The year 2019 saw spot exchanges grow to over 130 (compared to 270 tracked in Jan 19) being listed on CoinGecko. However, the existing exchanges have remained on top, trading activity wise. The leader in spot trading is still Binance while BitMEX leads in derivatives trading.
CoinGecko also launched derivatives tracking this year and listed 25 exchanges which do so. The derivatives trading volume increased by 840% to 26B average (compared to 2.5B in Jan 19). Spot trading painted a similar picture, growth wise, increasing by 364% to 65B average (compared to 14B in Jan 19)
Bitcoin perpetual swaps are the most popular products of the derivatives market, averaging over 1.3B daily open interest (the number of derivatives product held by participants) and $10B volume throughout Dec 2019. In terms of open interest, BitMEX is the market leader (capturing 52% of the market) whilst its nearest competitor Bybit has only 12% of the market share.
Macro Outlook of Crypto Industry – Stablecoins
The stablecoins market is still dominated by Tether (USDT), despite all the claims and lawsuits that it’s not backed 1:1 as advertised. It is the only stable coin which actually increased its dominance.
DAI was the most volatile stablecoin in the year 2019 with 111 times peg breaks (loss of 1:1 status with USD) while Tether (USDT) was the most stable with only 3 peg breaks. There is strong correlation of peg breaks with market liquidity, DAI has the least markets available and lowest trading volume.
Crypto Acquisitions and Investments
Over 4B in acquisitions and investments happened in the crypto world with over 350 deals in 2019. The three largest acquirers in the crypto-space were Coinbase, Kraken and Binance. The hottest sector for acquisitions was crypto data services (44%), crypto exchanges and custodial wallet services (20%) and financial services (16%). Coinbase has 13 acquisitions, Kraken 8 and Binance 4.
Further, Coinbase and Binance made strategic investments, covering all sectors of the crypto-economy. Some derivatives exchanges acquired were JEX by Binance and Crypto Facilities by Kraken.
A Decade of Bitcoin
The report includes special mention and info-graphics on Bitcoin, which completed a decade in operation. Some key points include:
If you had invested 1$ in Bitcoin in 2010, you could have had 90,000$ now.
The circulation of Bitcoins currently is 18,155,975 in Jan 2020.
There are 34,100 mentions of Bitcoin on Google Scholar (compared to only 309 in 2009).
There are currently 3241 cryptocurrency related companies and crypto jobs have increased by 1457% since 2015, all due to Bitcoin starting it all.
Decentralized Apps – Daily Active Users by Blockchain
In 2019, the number of daily DApps users rose to 3,117,086 users.
Ethereum held the majority of the share at 1,427,093 users (45.7% share)
Second was EOS with 518,884 users (16.64% share)
Tron came third at 967,185 users (31.02% share)
Followed by Steam with 120,560 users (3.86% share)
Neo had 55,493 users (1.78% share) and IOST ranked last with 27,871 users (0.89% share).
Masternodes
Masternode coins actually decreased by 37% in 2019 and actual number of master nodes also decreased by 15%. The top five master node coins by market capitalization were Dash at 379.7M, Horizen at 74.1M, Energi at 48.5M, ZCoin at 27.1M and Divi at 18.5M.
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT)
The NFT user base grew by 1.58%, but there was no major increase on-chain activity. The total unique active addresses were 107,000 in 2019 (against 105,000 in 2018). The transaction volume increased by 10% in 2019 to reach 8,842,776 transactions (against 8,096,615 transactions in 2018). The most dominant NFT community was My Crypto Heroes which held greater than 50% share in the year 2019.
CoinGecko Report Miscellaneous
The report also contains some information about mainstream players entering the blockchain world and what 2020 holds in store for crypto. Some data on stacking Bitcoin sats is included in the report, with approximate calculation of the Return on Investment (ROI), one would have gotten, had he or she chosen to buy $ 5 worth of Bitcoin every day since 2015. The crypto predictions from the major players and leaders in the crypto-arena for 2020 are also mentioned plus prominent editorials on Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Ethereum 2.0 are included.
