Cryptocurrency’s $600-billion crash

Cryptocurrency’s $600-billion crash

The 2018 selloff in cryptocurrencies plumbed new depths on Wednesday after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission dented enthusiasts’ hopes for a VanEck exchange-traded fund backed by Bitcoin.

A broad selloff in coins of all sizes reduced the market value of virtual currencies tracked by Coinmarketcap.com to about $230 billion, the lowest level since November. Digital assets have now lost about $600 billion since crypto-mania peaked in January, more than the market value of all but the four biggest companies in the S&P 500 Index.

[Bloomberg]

yawn

To the mooooooooofuuuuuuuck

To be fair, it's still not that bad on an annualised basis. I think it would be better described as a temporary $600bn bubble that burst than a crash, but maybe that's just semantics. Anyhoo, despite everything, I'm still very long term bullish on quality crypto counters. The thousands of dodgy ICOs and Sh**coins kind of needed to happen and were an inevitable consequence, but they created mania, noise and distortions so I'm very glad that it's a phase that's almost over.

Possibly there's still a lot more downside to prices before it hits bottom, but I believe that as things settle down and stabilise what remains will be stronger and will gradually organically grow over time as the real practical unglamorous background work of building platforms, integrating payment systems, etc slowly unfolds. To my mind the sea change cryptos will cause is as inevitable as that caused by the internet.

Yeah, it's been a huge crash. In USD terms I'm only about 30% up on my total purchases last year. That's a big drop from being nearly seventeen times up in early Jan 2018. Happy to hodl.

Yawn