The situation isn’t much better for Ethereum, down 5% over the week, while newer best-of-breed coins like Solana fell over 10% this week.
Governments around the world are being walloped by inflation levels not seen in 40 years, and central banks are finally taking measures—like jacking interest rates and shrinking their balance sheets—to fix this.
That’s fine as long as there are enough “greater fools” out there to buy that garbage, but when the music stops, it’s going to look a lot like the ICO fallout of 2018.
By the time the next boom rolled around in 2016, crypto had gone from being just Bitcoin and a handful of altcoins like Litecoin and XRP to encompass smart contracts, utility tokens, and a multi-chain future.
A series of stylish NFT platforms had eclipsed the primitive CryptoKitties of the previous boom, DAOs took off for real, and the entire plumbing of the industry had become far more sophisticated.
It’s going to happen again.
It’s hard to predict exactly what this next era will look like, but a good bet is that it will feature low gas fees, easy-to-use Layer 2 options, and NFTs moving to the core of the music and entertainment industries.