This wasn’t (all) crypto’s fault

The mad 2017 token price runup and subsequent collapse in 2018 was largely endemic to the crypto sector. It was stoked by investor mania for ICOs and by blind belief in the untested ideas of founders who raised billions of dollars on flimsy white papers. The inflated prices for this vaporware inevitably deflated when doubts about their promises grew.

The current situation is quite different. While excessive enthusiasm for new tokens contributed to unsustainable price rallies, crypto’s ballooning market capitalization was also fueled by unprecedented fiat monetary expansion as central banks pumped trillions of dollars worth of quantitative easing into the global economy to soften the impact of a pandemic-fueled global recession. That surfeit of dollars, euros and yen flowed into risk assets: stocks, commodities, real estate, fine art and, significantly, cryptocurrencies. Now we’re all paying the price for that as an inevitable inflation problem is prompting the U.S. Federal Reserve to remove the punch bowl.

With good reason: Crypto’s concurrent collapse with stocks and other assets led some to question the claim that bitcoin is an uncorrelated asset and a hedge against inflation. But I think the excessive part of the crypto price rally – the part that took bitcoin from $30,000 to $65,000 but not that which drove it from $10,000 to $30,000 – was perhaps due to exogenous factors.

Once prices settle, we should be in a better position to gauge how much of their future advances will be driven by legitimate crypto-only factors such as those described in points one through four, and how much is caught up in the risk-on/risk-off whims of a global financial system addicted to central bank largesse.