🐻 2022 biggest winners and losers in crypto 🏆

GM friends. The year is almost coming to an end and we think you should give yourself a pat on the back. If you made it through the UST/LUNA crash, bankruptcies, hacks and FTX debacle, you can make it through anything 💪.

Before we jump into this week's issue, if you’re new around here and feel a bit lost, don’t worry. Hit subscribe and we’ll get you caught up on all the latest news in web3, 2x a week.

In this issue:

• 💩 The biggest loser in 2022: There have been a number of dumps this year, but this one coin dragged the whole market down with it.

• 👑 The biggest winner in 2022: In a sea of red, this crypto was able to emerge and come out on top.

• 🗞️ Other news: SBF is back in the US, Caroline pleads guilty to crimes and a major Bitcoin mining firm goes bankrupt.

1/ The biggest loser in 2022

Let’s just get it out of the way and talk about the biggest loser of 2022. Overall, the global crypto market cap saw a -60% drop this past year, but there was one particular coin that cast a plague on the market. To no surprise, the biggest dump in 2022 was…

💩LUNA/UST

No matter how hard we try to move forward, everything always seems to point back to UST/LUNA. According to Chainalysis, the depegging of Terra’s UST stablecoin and the subsequent collapse of 3AC and Celsius Network drove much bigger losses for investors than FTX did.

To quickly recap, UST is an algorithmic stablecoin that was meant to stay at a steady 1:1 value with the US dollar. Unlike other stablecoins, such as USDC or Tether which are backed by fiat cash, UST was backed by LUNA.

The mechanism proved to fail. As the overall crypto market declined, the FUD prompted an exodus of investors to liquidate their UST positions, causing it to lose its peg to the US dollar and collapse LUNA along with it.

At the time, FTX’s former CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) emerged as a white knight by offering a lifeline to several crypto firms that went bankrupt due to their exposure to the failed crypto.

Little did we know that SBF was actually covering up FTX/Alameda’s insolvency from the crash. The recently leaked balance sheet showed that Alameda suffered a huge loss from the UST/LUNA collapse. To save the firm from failing, SBF moved FTX client funds to Alameda.

UST/LUNA definitely wins the award for the biggest black swan event of the year and will likely continue to haunt the industry past 2022.

2/ The biggest winner in 2022

On to some brighter news, the biggest winner of 2022 is…

👑 Trust Wallet

Piggybacking off of FTX’s collapse, Trust Wallet Token (TWT) was able to emerge from the sea of red and come out on top as the top gaining coin of the year.

In the past month, the price of TWT shot up +100% after gaining plenty of interest post-FTX fallout. As trust in centralized exchanges (CEX) fell, investors were frantically looking to move their assets to their own personal crypto wallet.

In comes Trust Wallet, the self-custodial crypto wallet owned by Binance. Unlike CEXes, a self-custodial wallet makes you the sole keeper of your keys and assets. No one else can access it, keeping it safe from the hands of criminals like SBF. However, it also means that if you lose the key, it’s gone.

TWT is the wallet’s official token that offers various utilities, such as voting rights to make decisions on the mobile crypto wallet and access to in-app discounts. With distrust in CEXes at an all-time high, it’s no wonder that TWT, or should we say CZ/Binance, is the true winner in crypto this year.

3/ Other news

SBF is officially extradited back to the U.S.

Caroline Ellison (CEO of Alameda) and Gary Wang (CTO of FTX) pleaded guilty to criminal fraud and will be cooperating with authorities on the case against SBF. Are deals being cut?

Major Bitcoin mining firm, Core Scientific files for bankruptcy.

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