Cryptocurrencies were front and center in financial news in 2021, with Bitcoin hitting record prices and investors increasingly seeing the digital currencies as assets that are here to stay.

In a broader sense, COVID-19 dominated new cycles. While 2020 will be forever immortalized as the year the pandemic began, 2021 will likely be recalled as a sort of in-between year — vaccinations were first made readily available, but the pandemic still raged with new variants spinning out and creating calamity. Still, there were plenty of other stories, including those involving cryptocurrency that gripped the world’s attention.