But to understand the dynamic that led to this year’s depressing year for crypto, we actually should start a few years before 2018. In bitcoin’s early days, Mt. Gox was the go-to service for handling transactions. Then, in 2014, it halted transactions and slowly copped to a crypto-hack to the tune of $473 million, the biggest hack of its kind at the time, and it gave many people pause. But it was still early enough for people to believe that the blockchain system was still getting all the technical kinks out.
SafeMoon is one among the handful of cryptocurrencies that made it to the top 100 crypto-list on its own. SafeMoon did not have the backing of top trading platforms and managed to gain investors’ attention by its projects alone.

EL ZONTE, El Salvador (AP) — After El Salvador’s congress made the bitcoin legal tender this week, eyes turned to this rural fishing village on the Pacific coast. Known to surfers for its pounding waves, El Zonte has had the cryptocurrency in its economy for the past year.
We set the stage for our formal econometric analysis by providing some graphical evidence. For example, in Figure 1, we see a close mapping of the prices of Bitcoin and Ethereum with their respective computing power values. Moreover, in Figure 2, we observe an even stronger mapping of the prices of Bitcoin and Ethereum with their respective network values. Interestingly, these graphs also show that when prices significantly exceed the trend in computing power or network (as was the case in late 2017), prices eventually fall and trace the trend in fundamentals. The convergence of prices to the trend with fundamentals suggests that fundamentals are the ultimate, long-run determinants of prices.