The five biggest fintech trends of 2021

3. Crypto: Too Big to Fail

This was the year that crypto became too big to fail, because if (when) there’s a crash in the market, the impact will flow into traditional finance. The industries are now too intertwined as more investors speculate on bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies – and rely on shaky “stablecoins” for collateral.

This is not the same as saying crypto has gone mainstream – it has not – but there are now millions of ordinary people with a bit of crypto in their digital wallets. The IPO of Coinbase on Nasdaq was a momentous event, normalizing the industry for many people who were on the sidelines.

Now the crypto industry is, willy-nilly, rebranding itself as Web3.0 or, via this year’s craze in non-fungible tokens, as the money of the metaverse (another meme that gained traction this year thanks to Mark Zuckerberg renaming Facebook as Meta). From Sequoia Capital to DBS, many traditional financial firms are taking the plunge.