Aliens TLDR

The year saw a tsunami of institutional investment wash into crypto, the NFT boom, and a country accept Bitcoin as legal tender.

Others charged Musk with hypocrisy, citing his response to a Jack Dorsey tweet that said Bitcoin incentivized renewable energy.

Beyond Musk’s Bitcoin 180, others have questioned the ethics of his tweets, which have demonstrably swayed the crypto markets several times this year.

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao The broader crypto industry has spent 2021 attempting to make inroads with regulators this year—but CEO Changpeng "CZ" Zhao spent much of the year trying to avoid them.

In July, FTX bought out Binance's shares in FTX, and it sure looked like the reason was tension over their different approaches to regulation: "I'm not involved in the conversations between them and regulators, and so all I can do is speculate, but something I'll say is that we try really hard to be as cooperative as we can with regulators," FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried told Decrypt at the time.

"I think that when you don't do that, and when you sort of appear less flexible or responsive, I think that’s more likely to lead to cases where regulators might feel like they have no choice but to start bringing the hammer." In recent months, CZ has finally changed his tune and attempted to play nice by hiring former regulators.

It wasn’t enough to prevent him from making Decrypt’s naughty list.

They also contributed to another round of headlines that make Bitcoin look to many people like a tool for cyber-criminals.

The Chinese Communist Party Like Elon Musk, Xi Jinping and his minions made a hardline turn on Bitcoin this year.

More importantly, China's overall approach to crypto has been famously contradictory: Even as it drove out miners and restricted Chinese tech companies from touching crypto, it launched its own government-promoted digital yuan.

As Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz tweeted in June, it's all about government control, and it goes against the whole point of Bitcoin.