It was not a very good month for crypto, but it was a very good year, and, when we look back a couple of years from now, it will probably be identified as a pivotal year the same way 2017 was.

OSOM is the all-in-one Crypto Wealth Manager. Wallets, exchange, Crypto Roboadvisor, DeFi Earn to lend stablecoins in DeFi, and Crypto Strategie, it is all you need in a Crypto Asset Manager. No more losing money trading like 89% of retail traders. We automate it all.

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If you are wondering how the Autopilot Works, read this. The live performance is here If you want to know why you might want to use DeFi Earn, read this.

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🔬Markets: Settle on €1.9 Trillion, a 183% gain for 2021

The Global Market Capitalisation of Crypto returned to where it was in early October and cleared most of the last quarter's gains. It's a 16.54% loss for the month, and even a 20.61% loss if we look at the largest 200 cryptos excluding stablecoins (INDEXNASDAQ: CMC200).

It all went well until December 3 when the market crashed about 20% and then oscillated between €1.9T and €2.1T before finally closing the year on €1.9T. It's "a little" down from its annual - and all-time - high of €2.5T of mid-November but it's 1.8 times where it started the year. If you need to sum it up broadly, let's just say the Crypto market more than doubled in size in 2021. So while the month - and quarter - went exactly in the exact opposite direction of most analysts' expectations, the year has been good to crypto in general.

Bitcoin lost 19.03% over the month and seems to have severely veered off course from the popular "stock to flow" predictions. At least for now.

The Crypto Market Capitalisation excluding BTC did a little better than the market overall with a loss of "only" 13.9%. If we only take the top 200 coins minus BTC and remove the stablecoins, the performance was the worst of all the indices we look at, with a loss of 22% over the month(INDEXNASDAQ: CMC200EX). That can likely be attributed to the continuous growth of the stablecoin's market capitalization as well as the fact that some money is rotating out of "top coins" to take some profits and move into smaller assets in search of more return potential.

The OSOM Crypto Autopilot keeps on doing a good job in that weird Q4 market. The € performance was -12.59%. The ₿ performance for the Autopilot was 8.07%.

🏎️ The coins that most contributed positively to the BTC performance this month were, in that order: LUNA, NEAR, MATIC, CELO. If you are looking for a theme, it's an "alternative to Ethereum and algorithmic stablecoin".

TFUEL and AVAX are the two positions that went the most in the opposite direction.

🤿 Autopilot Deep-Dive

💰 What are the holdings in the Autopilot Exactly?

As 2022 started with fireworks and hope, the OSOM Crypto Autopilot held on to the following 12 assets, in a universe of 74, while the team now tracks 237 assets.

BTC: 23.6%; LUNA: 23%; NEAR: 11.2%; CELO: 11.1%; TFUEL: 8.4%; GALA: 6.7%; TRX: 6.1%; MATIC: 4.7%; AXS: 2.2%; MANA: 1%; IOTX: 1%; LRC: 1%

✍️ Interesting Crypto Autopilot Moves in December 2021

As market dynamics change quickly in Crypto, there was quite a bit of activity in the universe of assets that the OSOM Crypto Autopilot can choose from. NANO was removed, but GALA, MINA, and IOTEX were added. The diversity of those coins is interesting (gaming, payments, IoT) as it shows that the sector's growth is not concentrated on one single area (as it might have been during the "summer of DeFi" where all we saw were DeFi tokens) but is spread across many different use cases. As is often the case, you'll notice that the Autopilot has quickly taken a position in those newly whitelisted assets. As it looks for diversification, and as new tokens often exhibit quite unique price patterns, it often favors small positions into new coins.

Of note this month: LUNA's back, in full force, in the markets as in the Autopilot portfolio. The position in the model portfolio grew from about 2% at the beginning of the month to 5% mid-month before reaching about 20% before Christmas and almost equalling BTC as we rolled into the new year.

We haven't been shy about saying that we like it, so it's nice to see it do well. LUNA was worth about half a euro this time last year, so seeing it hit €88 is wild. It entered the Top 10 largest assets by market cap early in December and now sits at number 9 after passing Polkadot.

The market capitalization of its main product, UST, has also gone from about €150M to €9.12B in the span of a year and taken over DAI as the first algorithmic stablecoin by market cap.

And with US$19B in Total Value "Locked" (TVL), Terra(LUNA) is now the second-largest Decentralised Finance Ecosystem second only to Ethereum (who has a comfortable lead with US$ 160B). The major player and contributor to the TVL on Terra(LUNA) is Anchor Protocol which, alone, accounts for US$10B.

🙋 Your Questions on the Autopilot, Answered!

This month we shed a light on 2 questions that have been answered but get asked repeatedly so we thought we would revisit them.

And as a general comment, do note that we don't get tired of your questions, we love them. And to make it easy for you to find the answers again, we created one blog post with all the questions thus far, and we'll keep updating that article as questions come in.

Based on our analytics, people also love our Help Center and over 90% of your questions get answered by a visit to it.

1. What happens if you go bankrupt? Can my money be taken to pay your debts?

As a regulated crypto service provider licensed and overseen by the Estonian Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), we have very strict obligations to meet, and as per our Terms & Conditions, will not use either your fiat or crypto funds other than for the purpose of which you entrusted them to us, i.e. trading, purchasing and selling of crypto assets on your behalf. In other words, we are the "custodians" of your crypto assets, and these remain yours at all times. As such, we have a fiduciary duty towards you, in particular with regard to your crypto assets.

For practical purposes, we do not do anything else with your crypto assets than what you instruct us to do with them, i.e. on the wallets your crypto assets stay stored where you can check the balance addresses and move them from/to at any time, and in the Crypto Autopilot they are traded on exchanges by the algorithm as per the agreement with you. As for your fiat funds, these are prepayments in view of carrying out crypto transactions. You can move either your fiat or crypto funds in and out at any time.

In the event of a hypothetical bankruptcy on our part, no claims would be valid against your crypto assets with us (as custody does not transfer legal ownership), and in no event would these be used to repay our debts.

Such a scenario would, however, be highly unlikely, given that we are financially backed by the parent company of the Polybius group, which raised USD 30 million during its crowdfunding back in 2017. As such, we feel confident that our situation is sufficiently financially robust, and that any hypothetical bankruptcy would not be realistic for the foreseeable future.

2. How safe is it to use OSOM? I read that exchanges get hacked. Do you get hacked?

So far we haven't, and we do a lot to make sure we don't in the future either. We wanted to offer you more clarity around what we do exactly and so we published a detailed look at the result of our latest security testing before giving you a more comprehensive overview of our security practices.

You'll find all of the information here: https://osom.finance/blog/funds-are-safu-a-look-at-our-security-in-2021

📅 Crypto News & Happenings in December - Month in Review

Weird price action is distracting but for the long-term crypto participant, it's important to look at long-term trends & not pay too much attention to the short-term volatility that might exist for reasons that are exogenous to Crypto.

For example, people might need to pay taxes or make a quarter look good and take profits at the end of the year to be able to do that. Or it's the end of a lot of options contracts. There is a certain "seasonality" to finance that creates short-term volatility that isn't necessarily correlated with the market fundamentals.

But we know some people are getting angsty at the sight of a 20% drop because my phone, unprompted, pushed me this on Dec 21st.

But if it was a bear market like Crypto has known in the past, you wouldn't need to ask as you would immediately notice the loss of 85% of your crypto net worth.

So, after a snapshot of the month, let us take a look at some of the things that happened in December and that actually mean something for the long-term.

This is the "at a glance" summary of all the 925 articles, written by two leading crypto publications, and turned into a word cloud. You can probably catch the themes.

Money and talent keep pouring into Crypto. The NYT had an interesting article about how tech giants are seeing their engineers defect to Web3. And Pitchbook reported that Venture Capitalist had invested US$30B in Crypto in 2021, over 4x the previous record. We're also seeing Web2 services realize that Web3 makes sense for them, such as when Kickstarter realizes it could maybe be a DAO or Ubisoft realizes that digital items ought to be NFT's, or Deutsche Telekom - who had already partnered with Celo - now partners with Polkadot.

Talking about Polkadot, it launched its first parachains. We had talked about the first auctions last month.), but this time it's the real deal and, one could say, the real kickoff for Polkadot.

There was a senate hearing on stablecoins in the US (it's about two hours, starts at min 15, and you can rewatch here). It was surprisingly level-headed and it doesn't look like there the rise of stablecoin will face much opposition. On the contrary, it even appears as though the US might leave the task of issuing crypto dollars to the private markets as opposed to many other central banks who are working on Central Bank Issued Digital Currency. A House of representative hearing, earlier in the month, had also been warmer than anticipated.

And while some at the senate hearing were noting that stablecoins are more often used for trading than they are for buying groceries at the corner store, it might be rapidly changing. Indeed, Facebook-owned Whatsapp has launched a crypto payment pilot in the US in partnership with the Paxos stablecoin issuer.

And at Facebook, as the team of Novi (the facebook-built wallet which was supposed to allow you to use Libra/Diem) abandons the project and disperse to try their hands at something else, some VCs are happy to give them some money to get started.

❄️ What Does January, and 2022, Have in Store for us?

That's probably a million-dollar question, literally. And around new year's day, there are always many people that put forth predictions for the year. Because "it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future", they are usually wrong, but they are nonetheless fun and, if anything, tell you about what people are thinking right now.

So we curated some of our favourite prediction articles and highlighted some of the ones that we think are interesting.

Messari has come out with 165 pages of analyses and theses for 2022. If you don't have time to read it all, here is what jumped at us: Crypto and Web3 is inevitable because trust in (traditional) institutions keeps on diminishing, and that's a little scary. On the other hand, the #1 people to watch is WAGMI (we are all gonna make it) because as traditional "communities" (institutions) lose their meaning, we form new ones. The crypto revolution is primarily a social one, and it's good to remember that.

Delphi Digital doesn't make a lot of predictions in its "year in review" but it is clear that they have opinions about what's likely to happen. And it looks like - like most people - they think L2's have a big role to play in the near future. And that you should keep an eye on the Cosmos Ecosystem, and we agree.

Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant joined Tim Ferris for a chat about Web 3, Regulations and NFTs. Listen to it and see if you agree. We think they make a lot of good points, especially when they echo the thesis of Messari about the "collectively owned future".

Coindesk's David Morris - who has a lot of interesting points of view and we've quoted previously - made 21 predictions for 22. We definitely agree that "The BUIDLers keep BUIDLing", that DAOs are going to get looked at more closely by regulators, and his take on the Facebook "metaverse". The rest is less clear-cut for us but it's a relatively short piece (not 165 pages), so do take a look and give it a think.

Find us on social media to let us know what you think the future holds!

🤝 A couple things before we part

If you want to know a bit more about OSOM and what goes on behind the scenes, read our CEO's letter.

Behavioural economists have found that the start of the year is a great time for new financial resolutions. So it might be smart to put some time aside to see what you want to be doing for your money in 2022. It's likely that your future self will thank you. And if you find that you want to dollar-cost average your way into a portfolio with some crypto - #DCA 🐜 - remember that you can start from about 100€/month in the Autopilot and 30€/month in DeFi Earn. Did you know you can easily make monthly deposits into Crypto Autopilot and DeFi Earn directly from your bank account? Now you know.

If you have a business or know someone who does ⚖️ and would you like to invest in Crypto and/or make or receive Crypto Payments, we now accept companies as customers, so just go to app.osom.finance, click "create account" and make sure to tick the box ☑️ Business account under the "password" field. For questions, just reply to this email.

🤖🍏 If you don't like using our kick-ass progressive Web-App, we have Android and iOS apps. Of course, we do! They're here for Android and here for Apple.

(a) This is not investment advice, nor a solicitation. Crypto markets possess a high level of risk, including volatility and regulatory uncertainty. Past performance does not constitute a guarantee of future results in any way. You are solely responsible for doing your own financial, legal, tax, or investment research before taking any actions. (b) Past performance is no guarantee of future results. (c) Be sure to check the list of countries we accept before signing up and sending us your assets.

All quoted performance of OSOM solutions is before performance fees. And past performance is no guarantee of future returns.