On Jan.16th, 2023, RootData announced the names of individuals who made the most investments in cryptocurrency in 2022. Former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan is the largest investor on the list.
Srinivasan is followed by Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, with a portfolio of 64 and 37 investments last year, surprisingly.
The third most significant investor is Sebastian Borget, Sandbox COO, with a portfolio of 18 investments,14 of them being 2022 investments.
Santiago Roel Santos made 14 investments, and Jayanti Kanani made 14.
Two Indians are top of the list of the highest investors. Research done by Kucoin in 2022 found an increasing number of Indians investing in crypto.
As of 2022, there were an estimated 115 million crypto investors from India. This is 15% of people aged between 18 and 60 in India.
However, 2022 was not a good year for the crypto market. The market capitalization dropped to $798 billion as of the end of 2022 from $2.9 trillion the previous year.
The crypto winter of 2022 resulted from the rising interest rates, which caused a wave of industry bankruptcy filings and drove down the value of the most well-known cryptocurrencies.
The worst-hit token was Polkadot (DOT), with a price loss of 83.6%. Tron (TRON) had a 27% fall, but was the highest performer and was among the top 10 most valuable cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.
The cryptocurrency exchange markets also made losses when some customers withdrew their accounts. In December, Binance saw $6 billion in customer withdrawals.
The accounting company Mazars, handling all Binance financial ledgers, withdrew its services and removed its reports from its website.
To bring back investors’ confidence, Binance stated it had contacted several major accounting companies. However, it was yet to find a firm prepared to cooperate with a private cryptocurrency company.
Markets are still paying attention to the drama surrounding the demise of FTX, and the Sam Bankman-arrest of Fried and extradition.
Meanwhile, there are renewed calls for tighter regulation of the cryptocurrency industry following the FTX’s collapse.
