I’ve written 18 crypto related posts since I saw the crypto light on June 29th. I could have titled most of those posts “what I learned about crypto this week”. After three months, on October 8th, I published my first thought piece “7 Thoughts On Blockchain, Cryptocurrency & Decentralization After Three Months Down The Rabbit Hole”. It’s, by a margin, the most read/clapped for post I’ve written. The 5th thought was “ It’s A Bubble….So What”. I went on to explain:

I say “so what” because I believe in Amara’s Law

With that thought piece at it’s 3 week anniversary, my thinking has evolved. It feel’s like we’re having a Cambrian Explosion in crypto. Just as the Cambrian period enabled the creation of a multitude of new life forms, the emergence of blockchain, cryptocurrency, and decentralization is opening up a wide range of previously unavailable markets as well as new ways to compete against entrenched incumbents. Sure, most of the new crypto entities coming in to being today will die out, but many of the ones that survive will be epic.

Given that view, I think the three charts below give additional perspective to the crypto bubble debate.

1. Amazon Price Chart 1997–1999

The chart below looks at the meteoric rise of Amazon’s price from it’s IPO in May, 1997 (at a split adjusted $1.50 a share) to a peak of $105+ in April, 1999. Amazon’s share price went violently up 70X+ in under two years. Was that a bubble?

The 2 “s”’s in the brown boxes in the chart above indicate times that Amazon’s share price split.

2. Amazon Price Chart 1997–2001

The chart below looks at the implosion of Amazon’s stock price from it’s actual peak in December, 1999, at $106+, to it’s low of less than $6 in September, 2001. That’s a drop of 95%. Is that a bubble bursting?