I have been around crypto since the days of SilkRoad and Mt. Gox. I still remember my college friend buying Bitcoin for under $20 and then ordering edibles off of SilkRoad. Living in a dorm there was free electricity so my suite-mate started to mine Litecoin. That was the early adopter phase, but after the crash of Mt. Gox cryptocurrencies faded from the mainstream media until the ICO bubbles in 2017. I was working at a trading firm at the time, and the senior traders likened it to the 2000's tech bubble. Anything that you would buy would go up. It was also around this time that the crypto exchanges were very inefficient and prices were not in line at all and I would buy and sell on various exchanges to try to arbitrage the prices, mainly taking on exchange risk. And some of these exchanges were definitely scams like Bitgrail and Cryptopia.
By mid 2018, the bubble had burst and crypto was once again headed to the 'dark ages'. A good way to look at the state of the crypto market is a graph of bitcoin dominance, which is the total market cap of bitcoin over the total market cap of crypto assets. Typically during bitcoin bear markets, bitcoin dominance will be higher, as the altcoins have a much larger beta than bitcoin does. We are currently in the middle of a bitcoin winter, with bitcoin stuck between 9-10k, but I am very bullish on the long term possibilities. Take that with a grain of salt as I have been bullish ever since I heard about Bitcoin. Honestly speaking, there are a lot of interesting projects being built right now especially in the DeFi space. I will shed light on interesting projects and look for potential investments in my upcoming blog posts.