Everything is dumb until it works.
As 2020 comes to a close, the cryptocurrency world is experiencing another late-year surge of consumer interest as prices climb in value. Bitcoin is over $23,000 as I write to you, an all-time high. Ethereum’s cryptocurrency has recovered sharply as well, returning to mid-2018 prices.
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These gains have created a huge amount of wealth for crypto holders. According to CoinMarketCap, after falling under $140 billion in mid-March during the market selloff surrounding the beginning of COVID-19’s battering of America, the value of all cryptos has surged to nearly $659 billion.
The tweets and the friends have something of a point. This morning I went around the Internet with a basket, collecting information about active bitcoin wallets, the distributed app (Dapp) market, the burgeoning decentralized finance (DeFi) space and other aspects to get a picture of what’s going on beyond mere price records.
After all, the price of every damn thing is inflated today, so seeing bitcoin set an all-time-high felt more appropriate than strange. Does the data show that there’s activity behind the valuation hype?
A quick look around the world of crypto
We have a few metrics to peek at, but let’s start with some old bitcoin-flavored favorites.
- Unique bitcoin addresses used, via Blockchain.info: Modestly bullish.
Per the charting section of Blockchain.info, bitcoin unique addresses used — a proxy for the coin’s popularity — is up some in recent weeks, and up more generally in 2020. It remains below historical highs.