Top Crypto Trends to Watch in 2022, According to Pantera’s Paul Veradittakit

cryptonews.com:

With 2022 already underway and the crypto market still sliding lower, it's an excellent time to take a look at what expectations industry insiders have for the crypto landscape in the year before us.

To help you get some insight into what to expect for the year, we took a look at the main predictions for 2022 made by Paul Veradittakit, a partner at crypto hedge fund Pantera Capital, as published in the fund’s latest Blockchain Letter.

The first prediction made by Veradittakit for 2022 is one that is likely to frustrate a lot of Ethereum (ETH) users -- namely that the network congestion and high fees we saw last year are only the beginning.

According to Veradittakit, the problem of congestion for Ethereum will get worse in 2022, as mainstream adoption of use cases that rely on the network continues to grow.

With continued congestion, however, scaling solutions such as Optimistic Rollups and more technically complex ZK-Rollups will continue to gain traction in the new year, with the former likely being the dominant solution in the near-term, Veradittakit wrote.

With the Ethereum network predicted to become ever-slower and more expensive to use, Veradittakit wrote that alternatives such as Solana (SOL) will continue to grow in popularity in 2022. This will happen despite the fact that Solana has already seen astronomical growth in 2021, he said.

“Recent activity in the Solana community, including the launches of massive funds for decentralized social media and gaming, suggests that the ecosystem will continue to grow immensely in the coming year,” the Pantera Capital partner wrote.

Additionally, interoperability between blockchains will become even more common, driven by the development of more cross-chain bridges. This will