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The risk is rampant on the financial markets. Stocks are trading at dot-com-era valuations, the IPO pipeline is full, SPACs are back, Bitcoins are heading for a record. And just at the right time, here come the crypto opportunists.
Fueled by a spike in speculative appetite, cryptocurrency entrepreneurs are offering new digital coins at a torrid pace reminiscent of the Bitcoin boom three years ago. Among those just listed: Porkchop, Davecoin, Spaghetti, Newtonium e Whale. Many have no obvious utility, but investors have invested billions in them in hopes of riding one for easy profit.The cryptocurrency world has always attracted peddlers of get-rich-quick products when fans of rewiring the global financial system begin to buy in a new idea. In 2017, it was Bitcoin and the end of fiat currency.
This time around, the buzz is growing about decentralized finance applications trying to cut institutions off things like loans. Back then, the tax cuts had propelled the global stock market. Now, central banks are investing trillions into the system, depressing bond yields and triggering a rush to alternative assets.
“I lived and profited from the 2017 crypto bubble and from it feels somehow it remembers that, “Michael Novogratz, founder and CEO of Galaxy Investment Partners, said in an interview with BNN Bloomberg Television.” Back then it was ICOs. A new ICO every day and the herd would swim to that ICO and it would raise the price and there would be a liquidity and price frenzy, then it would collapse and they would move on to the next thing. feels Yes a little bit. “
According to CoinMarketCap.com, more than 500 coins have been listed in the last month. While exact figures for comparison are hard to come by, the boom dates back to when the blockchain frenzy saw iced tea makers, office product retailers, and even Kodak among those issuing thousands of coins with the promise of decentralized wealth. Those cashed in billions before regulators crackdown revealed that nearly all were nothing more than marketing propositions. There is no reason to expect investors will fare better this time around.
Maybe the memories are short in the cryptocurrency world, or maybe it’s a new generation of coin fans leading the latest wave of demand. Either way, it’s a piece with the explosion of account openings at retail brokerages, where novice traders have piled into bankrupt companies and chased rallies in little-known stocks that barely have income. The same forces are at work in the world of speculative asset companies, where investors buy into a publicly traded shell that aims to find a private gem to acquire.
As is often the case, cryptocurrency proponents promise it’s different this time around. Many of the new coins are tied to projects that have actually started and are structured to avoid some of the regulatory hurdles that have triggered many ICOs. And some decentralized finance apps, known as DeFi to the cryptocurrency crowd, have shown some promise.
QuickTake: Because the “DeFi” utopia would be finance without financiers
But coins like Porkchop and Davecoin don’t feel different from 2018. They have nothing of the DeFi veneer, essentially providing investors with a way to play. Porkchop calls itself a game, in which the total supply of coins is reduced with each coin purchased, thus encouraging investors to “pay to stay”.
Supporters of Davecoin, dubbed “a cryptocurrency awareness project”, get coins for some tweets promoting it, with the promise of windfall if the president or famous crypto investors like the Winklevoss brothers retweet them. It recently rose 50% in 24 hours when stock trader Dave Portnoy, who inspired but is not affiliated with the coin, switched to crypto before dropping when he sold his holdings.
Other coins launched in recent months, such as Compound, have become a favorite of speculators seeking triple-digit returns through strategies such as yield collection, where users try to get as many coins as possible and raise coin prices. Even among DeFi apps working to allow people to dismantle banks, coins are popping up as extra incentives.
“It definitely looks like a speculative pump and dump,” said Mike McGlone, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. “This for me is part of the problem for the wide advancement of the cryptocurrency market: too much supply, competition and ease of access.”
The wave of coins trying to cash in on the rise of DeFi has come to dwarf the movement itself.
While users have poured more than $ 7.75 billion in all DeFi applications, the ratings of all related coins easily surpass it. Chainlink alone, which makes a technology that serves feeds of data such as coin prices in DeFi apps, has a coin with a market cap of nearly $ 5.77 billion.
For veterans of the attempt to overturn the global financial market, wild speculation is part of the natural way new markets develop and does not diminish from a central perspective of how financial transactions should be treated.
These “are significant improvements over the the last-cycle model of raising an insane amount of money by promising to decentralize everything and then fail to ship anything useful, “said Jack Purdy, an analyst at researcher Messari.” I don’t think it will end that badly.
However, some of the newly launched DeFi apps have not undergone code review, which makes them vulnerable to leaks due to faulty code or hacks. Project Yam Finance recently amassed $ 750 million, then crashed within days when a bug made it impossible for the app to function properly.
Many new DeFi tokens are listed in the dozens of new decentralized exchanges, where anyone can put a token for free instead of spending millions on commissions in traditional crypto exchanges. Instead of waiting weeks to be approved, tokens can be listed on decentralized exchanges like Uniswap and Balancer much faster and in some cases almost instantly.
“The ease of handling and the ability to pump and unload with little legal recourse makes the space ideal for rampant speculation,” McGlone said. And that means open season for Porkchop and Davecoin.
– With the assistance of Vildana Hajric
(Adds Michael Novogratz’s comment in the fourth paragraph.)
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