All The Ways That Crypto Broke in 2022

As 2021 came to a close, crypto enthusiasts were brimming with optimism. After all, it had been a banner year: Nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, had crossed into the mainstream. Casual investors were talking to their friends about the relative merits of Bitcoin versus Ether. Some people even pretended to understand algorithmic stablecoins.
Fast forward a year, and the primary topics of conversation among even the most devout of the crypto faithful were more likely to be about Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced crypto co-founder of the fallen FTX empire, or whether they’d ever retrieve the coins trapped on bankrupt exchanges and lending platforms after a series of big digital-asset collapses.
Still, crypto prices kept falling. Bitcoin – the largest token by market value – plunged more than 60%, leading a rout in digital assets that erased some $2 trillion in total market value from the highs reached in November 2021. Bankman-Fried went from being described as a modern John Pierpont Morgan to being arrested and accused of multiple crimes including fraud. And NFT prices fell back to earth.