Arcane Research releases its crypto predictions for 2022

Blockchain data research firm Arcane Research has taken a look at the year that was in its final report for 2021 and offered its predictions for crypto markets going into 2022.

Arcane’s Dec. 28 The Weekly Update report focuses on Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) but delves into other major coins, decentralized finance (DeFi), meme coins, nonfungible tokens (NFT), derivatives, and others. Arcane offered a prediction for what would happen in 2022 on every topic covered in the report.

“Bitcoin will outperform the S&P 500 in 2022.”

The report noted that through 2021, Bitcoin has outperformed the S&P 500 index. Bitcoin is up 73% while the S&P 500 is up 28% this year, and Arcane believes Bitcoin will continue this performance next year. The benchmark S&P 500 index consists of the 500 biggest companies listed on American stock exchanges.

"XRP and Cardano will fall out of the top 10"

Arcane noted the tremendous gains on Binance Coin (BNB) this year, peaking at about 1600% in May and rounding out the year up 1344%. Based on this and the growth in market cap from alts like Solana and Terra, along with the NFT craze, the analysts are tipping Ripple (XRP) and Cardano (ADA) will exit the top-10 list.

Alternate layer-ones will continue to outperform ETH.

While ETH outperformed BTC this year with a gain of 455% to 73%, other layer-one blockchains outperformed ETH. Layer-one refers to standalone, base layer blockchains. Terra Luna ends 2021 up 14,823%, Fantom is up 13,549%.

Traditional gaming companies will increasingly add NFTs

This year in crypto can be defined in no small part by the massive sales of NFTs, and blockchain games like Splinterlands and Alien Worlds have around 526,000 daily active users according to DappRadar. Arcane predicts that in 2022, traditional gaming brands will branch into the NFT space and capitalize on the burgeoning market.

Even more crypto companies will go public and several will have valuations above $5B.

This year saw Coinbase go public on April 14th and it currently has a market cap of $72 billion. The five biggest crypto company public listings slated for 2022 are all currently valued over $1 billion. Arcane believes there will be a numbe others valued higher than $5 billion like crypto exchange Bullish, which is currently valued at $9 billion.

Bitcoin ETFs will hold more than 1M BTC by end of 2022

Several Bitcoin futures exchange-traded funds (ETF) were launched in 2021. They currently collectively hold about 846,309 BTC and Arcane says the growth will only continue in 2022.

Related: Ethereum whales dumping ETH as price slides below $4K, data shows

“Hashrate will become even more geographically distributed"

When China banned Bitcoin mining, global Bitcoin hashrate sharply fell, then nearly as suddenly recovered. Now the United States leads the world in hashrate, followed by Kazakhstan and Russia. Arcane believes miners will disperse even further into regions like Latin America.