2020 Sector Performance Review

If you've been involved in crypto over the past couple of years, you’ve probably eagerly awaited “the next big bull run”. That the long-awaited bull market finally arrived in 2020, amidst one of the most challenging macro events in our lifetime. With hindsight, we see that COVID led to an acceleration in money printing that lifted all asset prices, and to many investors, Bitcoin became a must-have insurance policy against monetary inflation and unprecedented fiscal spending.

However, Bitcoin was far from the only cryptoasset that benefited from this loose monetary environment. Fundamental progress across the industry has also renewed interest in the crypto asset class as a whole. The combination of the two has created a recipe for another exciting bull market that began in 2020.

Below, we look at 2020 in charts to highlight the top performers by sector. You can continue tracking these sectors on messari.io.

The chart above shows the top assets by market capitalization on messari.io.

• Top Performer: Chainlink ($LINK, +529%) is a decentralizedoracle network. It aims to serve as middleware between smart contracts on smart contracting platforms and external data sources, allowing smart contracts to securely access off-chain data feeds. Although Chainlink’s appreciation and valuation are puzzling to many in the industry, arguably having been fueled by a strong community, memes, and narratives more so than anything else, its fundamentals are hard to argue against. Chainlink continues to dominate the oracle space in DeFi with many of the industry's leading projects using Chainlink as their oracle provider.
• Worst Performer: EOS ($EOS, 0% change) is an open-source protocol by Block.one to support the creation of smart contracts anddecentralized applications (dApps). EOS is perhaps best known for its record-breaking 2017 ICO where it raised over $4 billion in a continuous offering. Like many smart contract competitors to Ethereum it has struggled to gain material adoption. It also ran into a host of issues that have hindered adoption, including degraded network performance due to spam transactions and concerns over the cartelization of its overlords block producers. In fact, Block.one launched its widely-marketed Facebook competitor, Voice, on a private protocol instead of EOS, likely due to lingering congestion issues. The high performance EOS once promised through its delegated Proof of Stake design has so far been messy in practice.