I was reading a cryptocurrency report from Goldman Sachs this morning and stumbled upon the following chart:
Now, put those dates in the context of the Bitcoin price action (which I think is a fair approximation of investor appetite for cryptos more generally):
This speaks to a corollary of The Golden Rule:* The market supplieth what investors doth demand. If people are willing to throw billions of dollars at crypto lottery tickets, you can bet they will find an ample supply of coins and tokens to invest in.
Another, perhaps more intuitive way of thinking about this is that “easy” money attracts “investors” like blood attracts sharks. The sharks come swimming, and if there is enough blood in the water a feeding frenzy will ensue.
This description from Wikipedia is rather evocative:
In ecology, a feeding frenzy occurs when predators are overwhelmed by the amount of prey available. For example, a large school of fish can cause nearby sharks, such as the lemon shark, to enter into a feeding frenzy. This can cause the sharks to go wild, biting anything that moves, including each other or anything else within biting range. Another functional explanation for feeding frenzy is competition amongst predators.
In boring old non-tokenized finance, this dynamic drives the credit cycle. Suppliers of capital get good deals when capital is scarce. They get crap deals when capital is plentiful. When capital is plentiful, and investors are overly trusting, capital ends up in the hands of miscreants and value destroyers (though admittedly, many value destroyers are well-intentioned). In fact, driven wild by greed and vying for deal flow, investors compete aggressively to offer capital on favorable terms to miscreants and value destroyers.
What kind of deal do you suppose you are getting when you exchange cold hard cash for a token with no protective covenants, that gives you no claim on equity or future cash flows, and which may not even exist yet?
* The Golden Rule: He who hath the gold, maketh the rules.