It’s no secret crypto trading is down, way down. By any intelligent measure, what we’ve experienced this year was a full-fledged market crash. With trading down somewhere between 70%–90% depending on who you ask, factor in the independent research by Blockchain Transparency Institute claiming $6B in daily trading volume is being faked, not to mention the fact that token values have plummetted by nearly $500B since January. Sprinkle in research that 80% of ICOs are scams (something like 95% never make it to an exchange and less than 1% have developed anything) and you have a recipe that says run for your life.

It seems like madness to be investing your money, worse yet others money or even worse yet investing your careers and risking everything like so many of us are doing every day (myself included).

But I am here to confidently tell you crypto and blockchain are not just surviving, but thriving.

Here is why: the dust is settling and we are seeing some absolutely astonishing advancements and disruptive technology taking shape. And its still in its infancy.

I have several Google alerts set with terms like blockchain, cryptocurrency, decentralization, distributed ledger, etc so I can keep a pulse on advancements happening outside of my purview and so my email gets flooded all day with news demonstrating the revolution taking shape with news like Uber’s Largest Shareholder to Launch Cross-Carrier Mobile Payments or Forbes New Report: 70% Of Finance Execs Believe Cryptocurrency Is Here To Stay.

With the majority of Fortune 500 companies investing in everything from distributed computing to smart contracts or cryptographic security, we are arguably experiencing the largest technological advancement in decades (some say of all time) as nations, governments, businesses, and communities find ways to bring their transactions, contracts, and records into the digital age.

CZ, CEO at Binance (the worlds largest crypto trading platform) recently said, “I’ve yet to meet a person who understands blockchain and doesn’t believe in it”. Powerful words, by a powerful player.

Sure, blockchain is revolutionary but how does that impact crypto and crypto trading?

If you are old enough or studied enough to remember the dot-com boom/bubble, there are some very eerie similarities to what we saw then and what we have seen this past year in crypto. In fact, Bloomberg just reported yesterday that the Great Crypto Crash of 2018 was worse than the dot-com crash.

The dot-com boom was a period of excessive speculative investing that happened between 1995–2000 when money was pouring into anything that had a .com behind it (often with companies that had no planning or real strategy) and it was following by the dot-com crash when many of those companies failed. Fast forward to 2017–2018 and we’ve seen almost the exact same pattern in crypto: excessive speculative investing into anyone holding and ICO often into companies with no real planning or strategy and those companies are failing.

But there was good news then and there is good news now.

Heard of Amazon? Yes, the Amazon that just passed the $1,000,000,000,000 (Trillion) mark. They were formed in the dot-com boom as was Google and Ebay. Yes, we are seeing those type of companies being born today. Fast forward 5 years and we’ll have new names at the same level as Google that are blockchain based. Binance just might be the first.

In spite of the murky waters and shady characters that are responsible for the crash, there are beacons of light paving the way. Pioneers with plans. Developers on a mission. The smart, honest, brave, as Steve Jobs puts it, “the hungry, the foolish” that are working around the clock to transform how money is defined, how transactions are made and are hell-bent on decentralizing the process.

In summary, blockchain and crypto are still in their infancy, prodigious things are being developed around the globe by the brightest minds, and we are experiencing a transformative technological economic revolution. The biggest companies are investing and the biggest companies of the future are just being born. Yes, we experienced a boom and bust because of over speculative investing into companies with no plans or outright scams and a frenzy of hysteria took place, but the dust is settling and I am confident we’ll see the hungry and foolish disrupt and decentralize the world.

Blockchain and crypto isn't dead, it’s alive, well and thriving.