I'm starting to think that artificially inflated valuations are getting wrecked more than anything else. For example, BTC going from $20k to $60k to $30k to $70k to $30k in 1-3 month swings seems less like "crypto be crazy volatile, yo!" and more like the weirdness an abundance of COVID stimulus money introduces into organize value growth.

Everyone gets excited about "going to the moon" with this, that or the other coin, but there's only one way values go up or down: demand. BTC exploded in value because gobs of money flooded into it all at once before it was balanced by profit-taking. In other words, many coins were ramped up in value by a surge in buy-ins that wasn't tied to fundamentals. Wherever you believe that money came from, if the original source of these cash mountains flips the switch, them pulling out causes massive crypto slumps like we're currently experiencing. (In addition to events like Terra/Luna imploding)

Getting back to your post, I'd argue that many crypto coins are recovering from fake valuations propped up by a flood of excess money to prices more in line with where they would have been sans COVID. When zooming out, they're well above where they were 1-2 years ago which tells me that underneath it all, you're correct: There's still more interest going into crypto than out of it, but some particularly large players are messing with valuations in a way that can panic those caught unawares.

!1UP