Crypto market has gained global recognition as an emerging legitimate asset class (3 trillion$ at its peak).

Technology updates:

While Ethereum struggles to solve scalability issue, the community has voted to make it a deflationary asset like Bitcoin by reducing its supply.  The case of Bitcoin being Digital Gold and Ethereum being Silver has never been stronger than now. Also Ethereum moving to Proof of Stake mechanism means Bitcoin is the only major network run on Proof of Work consensus and is truly censorship resistant.

Polygon, the commit chain of Ethereum with its own consensus mechanism run by permissionless nodes has become the go to place for developers and consumers to build and use decentralised apps. Polygon has proven to be the Steel of blockchain. it is durable, scalable, it has low transaction fees and fast.  Other Layer 2 solutions such as Roll ups, Starkware and Lightning Network catch up.

Smart contract platforms such as Binance, Tezos, Solana, Cardano, Avalanche, Algorand, Stacks, Filecoin, etc are also growing as they tend to be scalable.

Transactional privacy has become important as Defi grows as front running orders on chain becomes a major issue. Aleo, Secret Network, etc could provide privacy solutions to existing chains.

Application updates:

Data storage:

Decentralised storage of data continues to grow with Filecoin leading the challenge to corporate owned cloud platforms like AWS, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, etc.

Finance:
Defi is growing to take over Cefi (>100 Trillion $ TAM) with over 100bn$ locked in these protocols in 1 year when Compound kickstarted the initiative. Defi now includes suite of solutions from borrowing and lending crypto, to insuring it, to swapping it through decentralised exchanges like Uniswap to having asset management solutions and it is all growing 50x. Real world asset protocols such as Maple, Goldfinch, etc are promising.

Culture:
Metaverse, esports, mobile games, daily fantasy sports, etc are increasingly using blockchain. Digital goods (skins, collectibles, etc) are growing in popularity to unseat dominance of physical sports, art and collectibles. NFT market continues to grow with artists, performers, sport leagues, joining the euphoria of digital scarcity.

New age crypto based social networks and enterprise marketplaces are hot!

The promise of Security tokens going mainstream appears to be near with institutional participation in Republic’s token sale.

Organisation:
After the 2016 hack of first DAO, DAOs have made a big comeback. Compared to a traditional company, all the actions and funding of a DAO are transparent to everybody all the time.   It is  flat in hierarchy, everybody is equal, it is open to everybody who wants to join one and is global. The assets of a DAO are controlled by stakeholders directly by a token.  Founders involve DAOs to gain community participation into their applications and protocols. DAO treasury management has become an increasingly important and complex function.