— Allie Caccamo is now an associate doing tech policy strategy at Christoff & Co. She most recently was an account coordinator at Allison+Partners.
Mainstream companies across industries have taken interest — and in some cases themselves invested in — cryptocurrency and blockchain in 2021. AMC, for example, recently announced it will be able to accept Bitcoin payments by the end of this year. Fintech companies like PayPal and Square are also betting on crypto by allowing users to buy on their platforms. Tesla continues to go back and forth on its acceptance of Bitcoin payments, though the company holds billions in crypto assets. Experts predict more and more of this buy-in.

The long term positive coherence relationship observed between online metrics and price may be the result of another factor which we hypothesise could be technical progress. As a project makes technical progress, it is likely to have a community form around it over time, increasing online activity and also demand, and hence price, of the particular cryptocurrency. An interesting avenue of future work would be to consider the coherence between price and technical progress (via looking at each projects source code repository—these are available as cryptocurrency projects are generally open-source).
Recent proposed legislation could make it easier for the IRS to find cases of tax evasion when it comes to crypto, though investors should already keep records of any capital gains or losses on their crypto assets. But the new rules may also make it easier for investors to properly report crypto transactions.