Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big-picture power shifts remaking our world.

The breakdown is sponsored by Nidig and produced and distributed by CoinDesk.

What's going on, guys? It is Friday, December 17th, and today we are doing a fun little

episode where I'm going to look at some of the most interesting numbers from two awesome

end of the year research reports. The first comes from Masari and is their annual

crypto-theses report. This started a few years ago with Masari CEO Ryan Selkis just going

off on a tangent on Twitter one day and writing 100 theses that he published to Medium.

And now it's grown into a nearly 200-page report that has multiple contributors and a ton of, shall we

say, attitude. It's always a really fun read and this year is no different. However, it's not the

only great end-of-year report out there. The Block Research also dropped their nearly 200-page

222 digital asset outlook. That project was led by the Block's head of research, Larry Sermak, but has a ton of

people contributing as well. So first of all, thank you so much to both the teams at Masari and

the Block for their awesome work on these reports. And now let's dig into some of these numbers.

These are presented in no particular order, but I think tell the story of the year in a pretty cool fashion.

The first number is $3 trillion, and of course that's the total market capitalization of the

crypto industry, or at least that's where we peaked. Now, this is a pretty big and monumental

year for total market cap in the crypto industry. In January, it hit $1 trillion for the first time.

As Masari put it, crypto's $3 trillion of liquid value creation in 10 years now rivals that of

all other venture-backed startups combined, which is a pretty phenomenal statistic.

Now, what I want to add about why it's significant is a couple things. First,

one of the themes that is so clearly a part of both 2020 and 2021 is the institutionalization

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