This change is mostly traceable to the rise of specialized tokens filling various market needs, something very few could have predicted 5 years ago. 

If you are surprised to know any of this, you might have been reading too many obituaries from people who treat Bitcoin and all related products as a speculative mania rather than a fundamental innovation in information technology deserving of serious attention. Ironically, it's these same people who never stop inveighing against speculative manias in crypto – a technology only ten years old! – while ignoring the whole underlying value of a new and programmable system for managing ownership and flows of property titles.

To be sure, my data is selective. It excludes the wild December 2017 runup of all prices, a time when the lines at bitcoin ATMs were around the block. Buying at the top and holding would have been … regrettable.

You can read countless stories of how so many people have been suckered into a bubble and ruined their lives by investing in various crypto assets. People use this event as a way of saying that crypto is nothing but a shiny object signifying nothing.