Editor's note: Cryptocurrencies ventured further into the mainstream in 2021...

Phrases such as "NFT" – for non-fungible token – entered the Main Street lexicon. And the two most popular cryptos – bitcoin and Ethereum – hit new all-time highs (and pulled back) in a wild year.

But most casual investors don't realize that the increased interest and attention in cryptos in 2021 stemmed from what our colleague and Crypto Capital editor Eric Wade predicted in February would be the "real crypto boom to watch" this year...

That was a parabolic increase in cryptocurrency users – and growth of the underlying blockchain that powers cryptos like bitcoin and many others. This idea doesn't grab headlines, as Eric wrote in the February 9 Digest, which we're republishing below...

"Blockchain" is one of those words that has the power to confuse even the smartest people. And the media hasn't been at all helpful in explaining how this technology actually works.

But understanding the potential of blockchain technology is fundamental to understanding the "crypto story."

You'll see that this February essay from Eric was prescient...

Plus, it shows why he has been able to direct so many of his Crypto Capital subscribers to life-changing returns over the past few years. In addition to other winners that he has already closed, Eric has five open recommendations with gains of more than 1,000%.

With that in mind, let's recap what Eric said earlier this year...

Eric Wade Nails the 'Real Crypto Boom to Watch'

By Eric Wade, editor, Crypto Capital

I (Eric Wade) trace the dawn of the Internet as we know it today to a single event...

It happened in 1994... The release of a web browser ultimately called "Netscape Navigator."

Until that moment, the Internet was the province of programmers and computer engineers. You had to have hard-to-find hardware and specialized knowledge just to access it.

And once you did, you'd find a tiny screen crammed full of text and a dictionary full of keyboard commands.

Here's what the first version of the Netscape Navigator browser looked like...

As I said, Netscape Navigator changed everything... You didn't need to memorize hundreds of commands to use it. You could simply point your mouse at a link and click it.

Colors and pictures suddenly appeared beside text... And Netscape Navigator even came with new security features that made it possible to safely process credit-card transactions online.

The Internet was never the same.

Today, I can't help but think that the crypto world is like the Internet in 1994...

Using bitcoin, the world's most popular cryptocurrency, and others requires specialized knowledge. And many people – maybe you're one of them – have been turned off over the past several years because of these so-called barriers to entry...

Addresses, marking the location of cryptos, and private keys to access them look like gibberish... Sometimes, you even have to type specialized commands into web forms to interact with smart contracts. And you often must spend hours migrating tokens from one blockchain to another.

I know that dealing with these clunky features can be hard, frustrating even...

That's why my analysts and I spend a good amount of time in our Crypto Capital newsletter providing step-by-step instructions on how to get started. And of course, we precisely detail how to buy each and every crypto we ever recommend.

It's a little more work, but I believe being a part of this revolutionary industry is more than worth the small amount of additional effort to get started.

Many people who have been along for the ride in bitcoin's parabolic price move over the past few months probably agree. And there is much more upside ahead...

In this essay, I will explain why crypto is on the cusp of a "Netscape moment" – a breakthrough that we look back on today with obvious recognition of the brilliance of web-browsing software and everything that came after Navigator 1.0.

Soon, crypto will go mainstream...

Let's discuss why you want to bet on radical innovation...

When I was 27 years old, I made a once-in-a-lifetime investment that shifted the course of my life forever... My business partner and I paid $7 to acquire the rights to the domain name Wallstreet.com.

As I've written before, owning Wallstreet.com meant I could use a cool e-mail address (eric@wallstreet.com)... And I got an even cooler nickname. (Clients half-jokingly called me "Wall Street.")

But most important, for the cost of a cheap tie, I yielded a return so much bigger than any other asset class in the world that many people have trouble believing it...

In 1999, when I was 31, my partner and I sold Wallstreet.com for more than $1 million... We locked in 14,000,000% gains in a little more than four years on the same domain we had bought for $7.

I was once interviewed about the sale...

"How do you get to where you sell a $7 domain name for $1 million?" the interviewer asked.

I responded with the truth...

"You need to be able to say no to selling a $7 domain for a quarter of a million dollars," I said.

It might not be the first answer you expect, but imagine sitting across the table from someone offering you $250,000 in cash for little more than a word you spent $7 to buy...

It's hard to say no.

But I turned down a lot of offers on the path to $1 million. And that's because, back then, I quickly realized that the Internet wasn't going to be a passing fad.

I was offered $250,000 for Wallstreet.com for good reason. Folks were starting to realize what I had previously realized... The Internet had the power to change everything about the way we lived and worked.

That was still the case when I sold Wallstreet.com for $1 million... But by then, I was satisfied selling it for that higher number – a life-changing amount of money for me and my family.

Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies have the same potential...

I've watched this pattern of breakthrough computing abilities play out again and again.

When I was a child, my parents used mainframe computers as part of their jobs at the Los Alamos National Laboratory during the 1960s and 1970s.

Soon, personal computers burst onto the scene and captured dramatic market share through the 1980s and 1990s. Then, the 2000s belonged to the Internet... And the 2010s brought the transition to smartphones and mobile computing.

It's clear to me that the 2020s will belong to blockchain computing...

As I explained in the February 6 Masters Series essay, "blockchain" is one of those words that has the power to confuse even the smartest people. And the media hasn't been at all helpful in explaining how this technology actually works.

But blockchain technology gives us capabilities that simply weren't possible before. As I wrote Saturday...

The Bitcoin blockchain, for example, allows us to transfer bitcoin person to person (or "peer to peer") without any intermediary. (Bitcoin with a capital "B" refers to the blockchain, whereas bitcoin with a lowercase "b" refers to the cryptocurrency.)

When I transfer U.S. dollars to you, we either have to do it in person – with me handing you cash – or through the banking system, which involves me telling my bank to send money to your bank account.

But how does this actually work?

A good analogy is to think of the Bitcoin blockchain as a giant Excel spreadsheet that shows the complete transaction history and location of every bitcoin.

Every 10 minutes, the spreadsheet gets updated as an additional "block" of new transactions is permanently added to the spreadsheet.

Everyone can have their own copy of the spreadsheet. It's completely transparent.

Check out that essay for much more detail on how the technology makes this concept work, if you're interested. If you've never really explored how blockchains work before, I did my best to offer a step-by-step explanation.

Until now, the Internet has always required us to trust third parties...

We trust banks with the "dollars" that are stored in our bank account – but certainly aren't sitting in the vault waiting for us...

We trust Alphabet (GOOGL) to hold and protect our searches and spreadsheet data...

We trust Meta Platforms' (FB) Facebook with our photographs and personal interests or "likes"...

We put a lot of power in platforms like Twitter (TWTR) simply by using it...

And we hand over a lot of data to Amazon (AMZN) whenever we use its marketplace... which is used to sell more products back to us, like things we merely mention in a conversation.

Blockchains are different than private databases...

Rather than locking all the information away for a certain person or group to use, the data stored on a blockchain are done in plain view on computers all around the world.

In the simplest terms, this is precisely what a decentralized blockchain is... data that anyone can see and verify at any time.

Imagine a bank like JPMorgan Chase (JPM) opening up all of its accounting books and giving everyone the ability to review its individual accounts at any time. Each account wouldn't have a customer name, of course, but it would have a unique identifier... So you'd know that Account-1ac7, for example, had $20,201 in it.

Once you have publicly verifiable data like that, you can start doing things that have never been possible before. For example, I could write a program that says if any account has more than $10,000, I'll lend it $5,000 in, say, Ethereum (ETH) tokens, at an interest rate of 5%.

In a yield-starved world, that sounds pretty good to me.

In this scenario, consider if Account-1ac7 applies for a loan... The software could simply verify that the account has the appropriate balance, put a hold on $10,000 of those funds, and transfer it $5,000 in Ethereum instantly. No middleman or human would need to be involved.

And the thing is, this isn't just conjecture... It exists today.

This movement is called decentralized finance ("DeFi"), and the industry is growing faster than any financial innovation I've seen in my three-decade career in finance.

When DeFi meets 'TradFi'...

Fans of DeFi are so ardent, they have a description for the "old world" of banking that most people use today... "traditional finance" or "TradFi."

Since TradFi is closed off and gated, it requires several layers of middlemen. It requires brokers, clearinghouses, auditors, and specialized insurers.

DeFi replaces all of that with a few lines of computer code. As I wrote in a special report for Crypto Capital subscribers – "The Best Way to Earn 8% Interest in America That No One's Ever Heard Of"...

DeFi uses "smart contracts" to do all of the things that banks can do – like issuing loans, interest accounts, and even bonds and derivatives. You see, smart contracts are computer programs that run automatically on blockchains. So even people who don't have bank accounts can get involved. All you need is a mobile phone and crypto.

This technology today offers interest rates at or near 8% – and much higher, in some cases – for lending, borrowing, and trading... and even buying digital art through blockchain-based smart contracts that execute automatically without human intervention.

And the interest is one thing, but the underlying value of all of these platforms is going to grow even faster than they are today...

If you've paid attention to the crypto space over the past year or so, you can see that we're rapidly heading toward a world where literally all assets will be stored on blockchains. I'm talking about all assets across industries that you might not think of as being associated with cryptos today...

In the future, you'll be able to borrow money against your Apple (AAPL) stock, for example... or take out insurance on the Ethereum you've stored in an interest-bearing account.

The concept scarcely existed a year ago. We can verify that because everything in DeFi is trackable on blockchains...

In early 2020, just $800 million was being put to work in DeFi trading, lending, and insurance platforms. Today, in February 2021, that number is roughly $37 billion – up more than 4,000%. Take a look...

[Editor's note: Today, this number is near $100 billion.]

However, I admit that it can be hard to use DeFi right now... You must download special browser plugins and – quite frankly – use some poorly designed websites that are often built by anonymous developers.

That's why I'm so excited about the marriage of DeFi and TradFi that is just starting to happen today...

The big players need to enter the space in a big way...

When they do, rather than forcing users to learn new tools, they'll simply make them easy to use on existing platforms.

That is the crypto "Netscape moment" I'm talking about. And there are signs everywhere that it's upon us...

PayPal (PYPL) launched the ability for its 360 million active users to buy and sell crypto in October 2020. And the digital-payments company is expected to allow users to pay for goods and services with crypto sometime this quarter.

And just a few weeks ago, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency – basically the U.S. Treasury – told U.S. banks it can use blockchains to store and transfer funds.

I told my subscribers that this could be one of the biggest cryptocurrency stories ever.

Today, perhaps 200 million folks use crypto in one way or another...

And banks, social media networks, and payment processors are about to give billions of their existing users simple ways to use crypto, too.

In some cases, those users won't even know they're using crypto. A bank could, for example, convert dollars to a dollar-pegged crypto to process a payment instantly – instead of the traditional two to three days for an automated clearinghouse to do it.

And what if banks decide to give their customers access to the DeFi services that are already attracting millions of users around the world? The industry would explode overnight.

We've seen prices on cryptos go parabolic in the past...

My subscribers have ridden these moves higher, and I believe the popularity of crypto is about to take off... but the window to make the biggest gains might be closing fast.

And what I'm really excited about now is seeing the number of cryptocurrency users go parabolic, too. With the DeFi movement accelerating, 2021 is the year I believe that will happen...

Then, maybe one day, 20 years from now, somebody will post screenshots of the early versions of what these platforms and software look like... They will be that important.

Editor's note: If you're interested in learning more about cryptocurrencies from Eric, consider giving his signature Crypto Capital service a try today. Now is a perfect time...

In a presentation he put together earlier this year, Eric detailed how an unprecedented event in the crypto world that is guaranteed to happen in January 2022 could unleash 10 million bitcoin worth of wealth in a little-known corner of the crypto market...

In the video, Eric breaks the story and discusses six coins that could each "10x" your money in as little as three months... Get all the details right here.