Want to Know Where Crypto Is Headed? Remember 2008

tech.hindustantimes.com:

History may not repeat, but it certainly rhymes. Although the repercussions of the carnage in crypto markets won't be as broad or dire as those of the 2008 financial crisis, the parallels between the two episodes offer insights into what went wrong, and what's likely to come.

All financial manias have some features in common. Strong beliefs feed into self-reinforcing feedback loops. On the way up, positive performance and speculation compound one another, fueled by borrowed money. On the way down, everything runs in reverse. Failures erode trust and participants flee until the whole system breaks down.

In the 2000s, the central belief was that home prices couldn't decline on a national basis. This supported a boom in subprime mortgage lending, which pushed home prices higher and made owners look wealthier, drawing in more investors and encouraging more lending on ever more precarious terms. The increase in prices led to greater supply, which caused prices to flatten out and then decline. When this happened, the risks of subprime lending became evident, undermining demand and weakening prices further. Investors fled and counterparties demanded more collateral, triggering failures and further undermining trust until the entire interconnected constellation of financial intermediaries was on the brink of collapse.

In crypto, the belief was that this new market would keep growing until it displaced traditional finance. Consider the tokens issued by crypto exchanges (including FTX), offering discounts on fees: Their value was contingent on persistent growth in trading volumes. Trading depended on continued faith in growth, which in turn depended on more trading. But as soon as something faltered — the so-called “stablecoin” Terra