As recently as May 2021, Binance was under investigation by the U.S. government for tax fraud and money laundering, according to reporting by Bloomberg.
The little more than a decade old market for digital assets has already roughly quadrupled from its 2020 year-end value, as investors have gotten more comfortable with established tokens such as Bitcoin and networks like Ethereum and Solana continue to upgrade and attract new functionality. Excitement about the possibilities of decentralized finance and non-fungible tokens is growing, and memecoins like Dogecoin and Shiba Inu continue to attract attention.

We further explore the significance of cryptocurrency fundamentals at the aggregate market level using traditional asset pricing tests. For this analysis, we construct risk factors that are based on aggregate values of computing power and network. We denote the aggregate computing power factor with ACP and aggregate network factor with ANET. The innovation in constructing these factors is that we express them in cryptocurrency return units following the factor mimicking portfolio approach (Knez et al. 1994, Lamont 2001, Vassalou 2003).
All the signs, however, were there. Like previous bubbles, people were basing their belief in the cryptocurrency on their emotions, not any intrinsic value. Then there was the FOMO element, which only compounded things. Essentially, bitcoin became an international fever. Random companies were “pivoting to blockchain” for no apparent reason other than that it seemed like a way to create buzz. But when the bubble bursts, FOMO turns into fear of losing, which makes for an especially rapid plunge.