The crypto has had a volatile year with prices plummeting and exchanges collapsing. And after?

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The crypto ecosystem has had a rocky 2022 with Bitcoin’s price plummeting, non-fungible token sales plummeting and several major crypto companies collapsing, but one investor told Fox News that the technology that powers the crypto ecosystem has untapped potential.

“There is still a clear use case for decentralization and crypto,” Palantir investor and co-founder Joe Lonsdale told Fox News earlier in December. “This ecosystem, in the long run, I think some of these things will come across as useful to the world.”

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Despite Lonsdale’s optimism, Bitcoin, the most widely circulated cryptocurrency, started the year with a value of nearly $48,000 per coin, but fell to around $17,000, a decline of about 65% since January. And nearly all major cryptocurrencies are down more than 50% year-over-year in 2022, according to data from Fox Business.

Investor Joe Lonsdale said blockchain technology still has many clear uses despite the volatile year for crypto.

Transactions of non-fungible digital assets (NFTs) such as images or collectibles stored on the blockchain totaled over $17.2 billion in January 2022. NFT transactions fell to $414 million in November 2022, a 98% drop, according to Dune Analytics.

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Lonsdale previously said that many crypto companies that failed this year collapsed due to “a lot of corruption.”

FTX, once one of the biggest crypto firms, filed for bankruptcy on November 11. The founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was extradited from the Bahamas to the United States on December 22 to face multiple charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission. and the Southern District of New York.

Founder and former CEO of FTX cryptocurrency exchange Sam Bankman-Fried leaves the Magistrate’s Court building in Nassau, Bahamas, December 19, 2022.

Following the collapse of FTX, another major crypto exchange, Binance, which handles more crypto transactions than all of its competitors combined, has come under scrutiny for its transparency.

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“Bitcoin has done a lot of good in the world,” Lonsdale previously said. “It’s helped people get money out of Russia, Venezuela, China. It gives the financial system more freedom from governments that are doing really bad things.”

“Long term, there is a good chunk of crypto, but most of what we’ve seen in crypto over the past three, four, five years has been a speculative bubble,” he continued.

To watch Lonsdale’s full interview on the future of crypto, click here.

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