2018: A crypto year in review !

This year has been full of its ups and downs, granted it seemed like mostly downs… but it's not been all bad; yes there have been tumultuous times and some quiet times but for the most part, there have been hopeful times… So without further adieu lets take a look back at the highlights of crypto 2018… (just in case, you know, you’ve been hiding under a rock all year)
With a too big to fail attitude the market entered 2018 with a boom, and that, in retrospect, was precisely the problem. The space was overinflated with very little actual worth to back it up; a huge correction was incoming, and boy did it come…
The media turned on crypto. Words such as “bubble”, “burst”, “bear”, “Ponzi scheme”, “rat poison”, and “freshly harvested baby brains” …  These were all thrown around, and most of them stuck; BTC quickly went from hero to zero, losing almost $13,000 in little over a month.
In that time the prominent and well-respected money lending platform outright scam Bitconnect left the market, citing bad press and regulatory orders. The firm reassured users, saying:
 "This is not the end of this community, but we are closing some of the services on the website platform and we will continue offering other cryptocurrency services in the future," 

Now, the term “Ponzi scheme” gets thrown around a lot on the crypto industry, and for the most part, it is completely unfounded; however, unfortunately for investors of Bitconnect, Ponzi scheme is almost too kind of a description.
The scheme offered a daily return on investment of 1%, meaning that for a relatively small sum of $1000 you could have been sitting pretty at a gain of $50 million in 3 years… what could go wrong!?


Alas, it was bound for failure and one of the top performing cryptocurrencies of 2017, turned into the top exit scam of 2018.
However while Bitconnect's integrity was being called into question, the crypto industry gained further legitimacy as the Goldman Sachs backed Circle, forayed into crypto and acquired the popular exchange, Poloniex, for a cool $400 million.
Things were looking up, even as the market slipped further down. In February Congress held its first-ever formal hearing on cryptocurrencies, something which ended up being more of an educational session for members.
One month on the SEC was digging ever deeper, this time switching their focus from ICOs to hedge funds. Amidst this new scrutiny from the US regulatory body, the Winklevoss Twins proposed self-regulation, with the creation of the Virtual Commodity Association.
In May, Facebook started looking into blockchain capabilities by creating an exploratory group.
Circle made further waves in the industry raising $100 million during their funding round and forging a partnership with mining hardware giant Bitmain. Subsequently, the funding went toward creating one of the many stablecoins released this year: USDC


May was also the month that Goldman Sachs alleged that Bitcoin was “not a fraud” this ‘thumbs up' from such a prominent institution was marked as one of the many turning points for furthering the legitimacy of crypto.
In the same month, the SEC took another swing at ICOs by creating a mocked up token offering, in order to teach impressionable investors a lesson, how thoughtful….
Ethereum's legality was called into question with the SEC speculating on whether the cryptocurrency should be considered a security or a utility token.
June brought the news that security tycoon and all round crypto maniac, John McAfee was going to run for president in the 2020 election; vowing to champion cryptocurrencies above all else: 


Joy came for Ethereum aficionados as the SEC declared that it was “not a security”.