According to the BLS, rising energy costs fueled a rise in CPI, but for at least six months, analysts have tracked the rising costs of food and other goods. The current CPI is the highest it has been since October 1990. Core inflation, a figure that ignores the impact of the rising cost of goods, showed a 4.6% increase, a level not seen since 1991.
The long term positive coherence relationship observed between online metrics and price may be the result of another factor which we hypothesise could be technical progress. As a project makes technical progress, it is likely to have a community form around it over time, increasing online activity and also demand, and hence price, of the particular cryptocurrency. An interesting avenue of future work would be to consider the coherence between price and technical progress (via looking at each projects source code repository—these are available as cryptocurrency projects are generally open-source).

The good news is that the glare of public opinion will eventually dissipate, and that as the spotlight diminishes, real developers will find themselves in a healthier environment within which to do the work needed to unlock this technology’s potential. We saw a similar period of constructive building during the 2014-2016 hiatus.
A blockchain is a shared digital register of recorded data. For cryptocurrencies, this is the transaction history for every unit of the cryptocurrency, which shows how ownership has changed over time. Blockchain works by recording transactions in ‘blocks’, with new blocks added at the front of the chain.