- Early online firms collapsed as the dotcom bubble burst. The same technology now dominates the internet retail landscape
- Crypto has seen several major collapses recently, with investors losing billions
The brutal ‘crypto winter’ has taken the shine off the cryptocurrency market. Bitcoin is down two thirds from its peak, stablecoins have come untethered from their dollar pegs, and last week, crypto lender Celsius Network filed for bankruptcy, having effectively faced a modern-day bank run, most likely resulting in the equivalent of customers losing billions of dollars.
Is crypto dead? In a speech last week, Sir Jon Cunliffe, the deputy governor of the Bank of England said “the lesson we should not take from this episode is that crypto is somehow over and we do not need to be concerned about it anymore”’. In fact, crypto might already be more mainstream than you think – Cunliffe compared it to the dotcom bubble, in that the early stages have come with very high risks but the overall shift will continue.