The number represents the overall gain made by investors and does not take taxes or losses into consideration.
According to a recent report by analytics company Chainalysis, returns for cryptocurrency investors could have totaled as high as $162.7 billion last year.
This represents a huge increase over the company’s reported $32.5 billion in 2020. The rise in profits is related to the bull run that propelled the value of bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies to record highs and started gradually in Q4 2020 and peaked in early 2021.
The largest market share appeared to have gone to US investors, who received almost $47 billion, or 29% of the total.
Then came investors from Germany, the UK, Japan, China, and so on. A few of these jurisdictions currently have less favorable circumstances. For instance, China has entirely shut down its own cryptocurrency market.
According to Chainalysis, BTC and ethereum saw the greatest gains, accounting for 93% of the total.
“We believe this reflects increased demand for Ethereum as the result of DeFi’s rise in 2021, as most DeFi protocols are built on the Ethereum blockchain and use Ethereum as their primary currency”, discussed in the blog post.
Chainalysis claimed that the report was intended to provide an overall view of the sector and not to be overly critical of the final results, hence it did not delve into great depth.
To get a clearer perspective, the organization would like to examine individual or wallet-level advantages.
This has already started. Chainalysis does note that its figures only reflect investor gains and do not take taxes or losses into account.
