“The movement into bitcoin by institutional investors in Japan led to a feeling of FOMO among retail investors around the world as the price began to climb. These retail investors then entered the market through services like Coinbase, which had the most popular app on the App Store at one point in late 2017.”

What an awful lot of alliteration there. Bill Barhydt, CEO of Abra has told angel investor, Jason Calacanis why he believes the 2017 Bitcoin and cryptocurrency boom took place in a recent interview for Calacanis’ website, ‘This Week in Start-ups’. Catch the interview for yourself, here- http://thisweekinstartups.com/bill-barhydt-abra/ He believes that the intervention of the Japanese government in approving blockchain technology was enough to see the cryptocurrency economy stretch beyond unimaginable limits. Through their approval, Barhydt believes that investors and potential investors where assured that both cryptocurrency was safe, and that cryptocurrency was legal and thus took their approval as permission to go on and start investing. The vast level of investment then in turn encouraged huge growths, which we saw around December of 2017, a time we now affectionally refer to as the cryptocurrency boom. According to Kyle Torpey in Coin Journal:Is a fear of missing out enough to encourage people to invest into a non-physical entity? Apparently so. What do we think about this? Barhydt does make a good point, perhaps Japanese approval of blockchain technology did initiate a wave of investment but then at the same time, although, I’m not sure many investors would have initially questioned the legality of cryptocurrency at the level Barhydt is suggesting, this is because the concept has been around for sometime and many people had done their research prior to the onset of the cryptocurrency boom. Either way, this does provide evidence to suggest that even within a system that tends to be rather anti-establishment, governments and their bodies still have the power to influence what happens to the cryptocurrency markets whether we like it or not. In this instance, Japanese approval seemed to be a good thing, but if we look at recent events, for example disapproval in India, can government intervention have a flipped response and become damaging? I’d say not, just on the basis that now the industry has grown so much, people have already made up their own minds.