FOMO is back in style
Bitcoin was trading at just $16,400 when on November 30, 2022, the ECB published a blog post dedicated to its imminent demise.
"This is the last gasp of bitcoin before going into irrelevance," wrote the European Central Bank (ECB) after the FTX implosion, which dropped the price of BTC to roughly $16,000 and extended the best crypto winter ever.
And let's just remember that precipitous drop from the highs of 69k that TradFi watched with pleasure. Let's remember Celsius, Voyager, Three Arrows Capital, Terra, the mentioned FTX. Literally almost all the biggest players in the industry fell in a domino effect.
And that was primarily due to machinations that had nothing to do with economically viable, nor legal business. But also due to the fact that the industry was (was) still so small that the biggest players were intertwined multiple times. Everyone owed everyone. A downward spiral was thus inevitable.
However, a little more than a year after the ECB's premature obituary, bitcoin is at its highest level since April 2022, with a price of $44,000 or roughly 170 percent higher than when the ECB so confidently sounded the alarm.
There is no acknowledgment of error. Instead, the head of the ECB, Christine Lagarde, is publicly crying that her son ignored his mom's advice about investing in cryptocurrencies and lost a lot of money as a result. The question is what advice did she give him.
If she had told him to walk, she wouldn't have been wrong. It is also slightly problematic that even the son of the head of the ECB does not listen when economic advice is in the middle. But Lagarde aside, the familiar scenario is repeating itself again. Skeptics start asking about the crypto, disappointed people buy again, aunties at the market sell BTC.
In other words, FOMO is back. And when FOMO definitely returns, it will be in style. Namely, analysts note that, despite the huge amounts of money pouring into crypto, retail is still hesitating.
According to some calculations, as many as six trillion dollars are "parked" in funds in the US alone. But all that should change with the approval of the spot BTC ETF, which is expected at the beginning of January, and which has ignited such optimism in the market.
It's not hard to see how things got so enthusiastic. It's a big deal indeed that Wall Street heavyweights led by BlackRock are trying to launch ETFs in the US. Because anyone with a regular brokerage account will be able to gain exposure to bitcoin.
Namely, it is a simpler way for ordinary Americans than opening an account on, for example, Coinbase or, God forbid, discovering how decentralized exchanges or MetaMask, for example, work.
English (US)