“The manual burns, alongside the company having a pretty large stake in the coins, just speaks to me of a manipulation risk,” said Jasper Lawler, head of research at London Capital Group, an online brokerage firm offering cryptocurrency derivatives. “Whenever there’s some sort of mechanism to stop selling, that’s a bit of a warning sign.”
But whether that growth is sustainable, and what it means long-term, is still in question. “This crypto, blockchain technology, the public interest in it right now is being driven by a kind of speculative fever,” says Dr. Richard Smith, executive director of the Foundation for the Study of Cycles, a nonprofit organization dedicated to studying recurring patterns throughout economies and cultures.

Cryptocurrency’s technical foundations date back to the early 1980s when an American cryptographer named David Chaum invented a “blinding” algorithm that remains central to modern web-based encryption.
In 2016, this became apparent with the DAO hack. One way to fix the problem was to implement what’s known as a “hard fork,” which would essentially update the Ethereum-based software to fix the technical gaffe that caused the hack to begin with. But DAO users had to agree to this change, and there were dissenters. Though the hard fork was approved, it created two active blockchains with two different sets of rules. Ultimately, this hack–coupled with the inability to deal with it–caused the DAO to end in 2016.