Crypto market cap is almost back to its 2021 bubble peak

• Crypto investing peaked in November 2021.
• But now crypto is nearly back to those levels. And it’s not just bitcoin.
• It’s hard to explain why crypto is back, which means it could just as easily go away again.

It’s April 2024. Sam Bankman-Fried is going to jail for decades. No one wants to hear about your Web3 startup or your NFT collection. Miami is over it.

And crypto is as hot as ever.

How’s that?

Let me be more specific: There’s not a ton of visible interest in people pitching cryptocurrency as the building block for technologies that will reorder the world. But there’s a ton of visible interest in buying cryptocurrencies.

As of this week, the value of the global crypto market is nearly $2.5 trillion, per CoinMarketCap. That’s approaching its peak of $2.7 trillion, which it hit back in November 2021, a year before the collapse of FTX.

In between those two peaks, the crypto market imploded, dropping down to about $850 billion.

And to be clear: This isn’t just about bitcoin, which has had a well-publicized resurgence. Ethereum’s market cap is getting close to its precrash high. Investors have poured a record amount of money into solana and tether. (Though dogecoin, Elon Musk’s favorite meme coin, is still well below the peak it hit in the spring of 2021, when Musk went on “Saturday Night Live” and called it a “hustle,” and I bought 15 shares. I’m still down 72%.)

So, why?

You can read various rationales about the renewed interest in crypto — sometimes they are about institutions getting into the coins via exchange-traded funds, sometimes they are about what regulators like the SEC boss Gary Gensler will or won’t do about crypto. I’m sure there are people out there who, with a straight face, will tell you that technical analysis can explain all of this.

But to me, this says two things: People are always ready to invest in something today because it went up yesterday — until it doesn’t. And maybe you should go check your Robinhood app and take another look at those coins you bought a couple of years ago.