The year 2022 has passed, and we are saying goodbye to a very difficult year for many participants in the field of encryption assets and blockchain. The encryption industry has entered a rational range, but seasonal changes in the trading market have not stopped the rise and development of blockchain applications. Then, let's look back at the historical events in the encryption industry in 2022.

What historical events has the encryption industry experienced in 2022?

1、 Last First Cryptographic War: Russia Ukraine Conflict

In February 2022, the Russia Ukraine war broke out, and cryptocurrency became one of the best performing properties due to donation and payment methods, which led to the war being called "the first cryptocurrency war in the past". On the one hand, the time and transaction costs of Ukrainian government funds have passed the legal status of BTC and other cryptocurrencies in the country with high votes, and BTC, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies have been used as financing methods for military assistance, greatly reducing donation time and transaction costs; On the other hand, due to the sanctions in the fields of multinational economy and new technology, cryptocurrency has become an escape port for governments and individuals to avoid sanctions.

However, while Crypto was led to the center of the big country game stage, as this "financial recall" became popular in the encryption industry, the different positions of the encryption community once again caused a dispute about the core value of "decentralization", especially those encryption organizations that imposed sanctions on Russia because of regulatory requirements seemed to violate the original intention of the encryption industry.

2、 Create a new paradigm of GameFi: STEPN with fire M2E mode

STEPN claims to be the world's first Move To Earn Web3 game, which has won investments from Sequoia Capital India, Coin Ann, etc. Different from GameFi1.0, GameFi2.0, represented by STEPN, is very popular according to the offline scalability and social attributes of the sound website space, as well as the connection between virtual and physical space. Especially with the COVID-19 epidemic continuing to sweep around, our life, work, entertainment and other activities began to shift from reality to virtual situations. In addition to STEPN, well-known sports brands including Nike, Adidas and others are also testing NFT and the Metauniverse.

3、 The largest encryption hacker intrusion in history: Ronin was stolen for 620 million dollars

In March 2022, the Axie Infinity side chain Ronin official found that the Ronin verifier node of Sky Mavis and the Axie DAO verifier node were stolen, resulting in 173600 Ethereum and 25.5 million USDC flowing out of two transactions from the bridge, about 625 million dollars at the current price. The attacker used the private key attacked by the hacker to forge cash withdrawal. At present, US law enforcement authorities have recovered $30 million of Ronin Network's stolen assets, and the hacker address has also been included in the sanctions list.

Ronin found that the verifier node was damaged and part of the stolen assets had been transferred six days after the incident. In fact, the Ronin side chain is maintained by nine verifier nodes. In order to authenticate the Deposit event or the Withdraw event, five of the nine verifiers must sign. The hacker has well controlled five of these nodes (including four verifier nodes operated by Sky Mavis itself and one verifier node operated by Axie DAO), and the private keys of these five verifiers have been stolen.

4、 Crypto market starts big short: UST is besieged by assets

As one of the best properties in the last bull market cycle, Terra was once the L1 public chain second only to Ethereum. Terra's native algorithm, stable currency UST, is used by Luna Foundation Guard (LFG), a non-profit organization of Terra ecology, to store BTC and other cryptocurrencies for credit enhancement. However, in May 2022, UST took a dramatic turn due to asset hunting and the economic crisis, and the serious anchoring caused tens of billions of assets to vanish instantly.

This "encryption Lehman event" caused heavy losses to Binance Labs, Jump, 3AC, Hashed and Delphi, and the domino effect of this thunderbolt is still spreading.

5、 NFT: A New Battlefield of Web3

Compared with high threshold DeFi, NFT is becoming a common way for many traditional Web2 brands to transform Web3. In the past year, you can see that whether it is Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok and other social platforms, or Gucci, LV, Bulgari, Nike, Adidas, Li Ning and other luxury and sports brands, or BMW, Ferrari, Aston Martin and other cars are playing NFT marketing.

For such brands, embracing NFT is more about taking customers as the center according to personalized goods, improving their satisfaction and loyalty, and improving their brand value and competitiveness. Naturally, Web2 transformation also needs to deal with such commonplace issues as security risks and data privacy. However, for the NFT field, the entry of traditional brands will enrich the application field and demand, and promote the NFT technology to reach more mainstream consumer groups than the encryption circle.

It is worth mentioning that the former US President Donald Trump, who said recently that he did not like cryptocurrencies, also came to "sell" NFT. He forged 45000 Trump data transaction cards on the Polygon blockchain and sold them out after 16 hours, with a total sales volume of about 4.356 million dollars. The holder will also have the opportunity to meet with Trump.

6、 The mining era of Ethereum is over: Ethereum is merged

As an important part of Ethereum 2.0, the completion of Ethereum merger represents the era of Ethereum POW consensus, that is, the completion of large-scale graphics card mining, the pledge of ETH main network will carry out block chain verification, and the POW node miners will exit the historical stage. The key reason behind the upgrade is that with the large-scale development of Ethereum, the problems of insufficient network performance and high gas of Ethereum have hampered the ecological development. Blocked chains can improve the scalability and reduce transaction costs and time. In addition, the "difficulty bomb" is also one of the key catalysts for the merger of Ethereum. It has been delayed five times before the merger. This is a system algorithm to adjust the chain difficulty according to the block time. The purpose is to promote POW miners to turn to POS. In short, it is to artificially increase the difficulty, so that miners can no longer receive rewards and blocks, thus preventing the coexistence of new and old chains.

For the encryption industry, the combination of Ethereum is extremely important. It can not only reduce the gas cost and increase the network freight volume, but also attract more verifiers to participate in the protection and construction of the network, and achieve a more equitable distribution of rewards. After it is turned into a deflationary property, the network can be more thorough. In addition, after Ethereum is converted to POS, it can achieve low carbon and environmental protection, and the energy consumption in each transaction will be reduced by 99.95%. At present, after the merger of Ethereum, the number of pledges on the Ethereum beacon chain has exceeded 15.6 million ETH, and the total number of verifiers has exceeded 490000.

7、 Cryptographic Lehman Moment: FTX Collapse Slams the Market

In November 2022, CoinDesk released a news report that according to a personal accounting document they checked, there were FTT currencies issued by up to 6.112 billion US dollars FTX on Alameda Research's balance sheet. Later, Zhao Changpeng, the founder of Yuan'an, announced that as part of Yuan'an's withdrawal of FTX shares last year, Yuan'an received about 2.1 billion US dollars in cash equivalent (BUSD and FTT). Because of the recently disclosed information, Yuan'an decided to settle all the remaining FTT in your accounts.

Although SBF denied it, it did not seem to be useful. Then FTX broke out and liquidity began to be scarce. After trying to give "help", Coin An chose to give up the acquisition plan. Finally, FTX filed for bankruptcy reorganization in accordance with Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Law on November 11. According to John RayIII, the current CEO, after investigation, FTX not only has system integrity damage and shortcomings in overseas control, but also has control rights concentrated in a few inexperienced, immature individuals who may be damaged. But SBF denied all the charges in the testimony of the House Financial Services Committee hearing. At the same time, SBF's political contributions and its private relationship with the US management and control executives also surfaced. Alameda and FTX's "core team" and their parents are inextricably linked with American regulators, Wall Street executives and democratic party leaders, and the so-called effective altruism that SBF has always claimed is just a "fig leaf" for nepotism and political pragmatism.

Speaking of this, I believe you have a certain understanding of the historical events in the encryption industry in 2022. In general, throughout 2022, if we have to use one word to describe the year of encryption, then "turbulence" is undoubtedly the most appropriate choice. In the past year, we have confirmed the process of the interweaving of fantasy and reality in the encryption industry. The star projects at the beginning of the year, people selected by heaven, may be declared bankrupt at the end of the year and become prisoners of crime. The ups and downs of some star projects tell us that there has never been any people selected by heaven, The rush of capital can only bring about a short-term climax, and only tireless technological innovation can bring about lasting prosperity.