Monolith Reflects: our thoughts on crypto’s biggest year yet
Dogecoin, Bitcoin, Beeple, Elon Musk, El Salvador, NFTs, the Metaverse: wherever you looked, it was hard to escape crypto in 2021. Digital assets have been at the forefront of public consciousness throughout the year, helped in no small part by a market rally that kicked off around this time last year. More than any other moment before it, 2021 was the year crypto went mainstream, making its way into world-renowned sports and arts venues, major fashion houses and record labels, and even the balance sheets of countries and multinational corporations. NFTs took centre stage, catching the attention of digital artists, musicians, and celebrities and ushering in a new generation of adopters. Now, global companies like Facebook and Coca-Cola are looking into our space through what’s been dubbed “the Metaverse.”
But it wasn’t only mainstream-facing giants that helped the crypto movement thrive. Usage of our first product, Monolith, jumped to record highs this year, with total top-ups hitting $20 million. Monthly top-ups grew month-on-month, averaging $1 million early in the year and surpassing a staggering $2 million today.
However, we also faced challenges. The rising price of ETH early in Q1 significantly increased the gas costs for deploying and using Monolith wallets, leading us to take the decision to prioritise offering new users a regular Ethereum address over our smart contract wallet. After a temporary pause of new registrations, the change has been welcomed and helped users save on gas fees.
This year’s NFT boom highlighted the expense of interacting with Ethereum mainnet, leading some to migrate to other chains and ecosystems while scaling solutions are still in development. It’s become abundantly clear that Ethereum’s popularity has made the network inaccessible to many regular users. Although we have high hopes for Layer 2 and the completion of Ethereum 2.0, this year we’ve focused our energies on creating a solution that anyone can use to experience the magic of decentralised technology. That solution is token.com. While Monolith continues to serve our early community of Ethereum natives, token.com is designed to bring in the next wave of mass adoption. It’s set to launch in Brazil in early 2022.
Our project’s vision from the outset has been to help as many people as possible experience the boundless potential of blockchain technology and the freedom it affords. Today, both Monolith and token.com are focused on the emergent decentralised finance sector, but we think that we are about to enter a world in which anyone can buy and receive tokens for almost any type of asset. Tokenization will change everything, and we intend to play a central role in bringing the new decentralised economy to life.
We’ll be able to share more of our plans for the future in 2022, but for now, we want to thank every member of our community for sticking with us throughout 2021. We’ve received messages of gratitude from many of you who joined our journey in recent months, and it makes us proud to see that our first product is helping so many enjoy self-sovereign freedom. There is still a long road ahead — for us and the wider crypto movement — and we expect to run into challenges along the way, but we are committed to helping this technology fulfil its world-changing promise.
We look forward to continuing this adventure with all of you next year,
Monolith
