The Crypto Recalibration

What I am seeing is that Bitcoin is being recalibrated with respect to other cryptocurrencies.

We can see this in its dominance falling below 50% - although this has happened before.

What is different this time is the overwhelming rise in defi protocols. These yield-bearing algorithms show one deep problem with BTC: it's lack of a direct yield, unless you are a miner.

There are, of course, Defi products that do create a yield, but Bitcoin is not the foundational coin that powers those pools - that's the difference.

So, I can see this recalibration being expressed as an untethering of some of the BTC cross-rates. For example, ETH/BTC is at a 30-month high of 0.05. Again, we have seen this before, with the ETH/BTC rate going to double the current value. If it were to do that now, then ETH would be valued at about $6,000.

If we take a quick glance at the current Top 30 cryptos, we see they look very different to 3 years ago. Then, we were largely looking at infrastructure projects with a promise of future utility; now we see that utility as being largely financial services.

But with many defi products doing essentially the same thing, we are coming up towards a race towards efficiency. The irony, to me, is that so many algorithms seem to be hugely profitable precisely because they are inefficient. The profits come from such inefficiencies, but that means, someone is extracting those profits from someone else! This isn't so different to paying middlemen, just that they are now middle-algos.

There are many parallels with Britain's Railway Mania in the early 1800s. One interesting thing is that the biggest stockmarket slump happened near the end. Once all the networks had been built, there ended up being an oversupply! What was sold as a hitech innovation to be used at premium prices became a common utility sold at commodity prices. Those that later became the large and famous railway companies took that opportunity to buy up the smaller and less profitable lines. At some point, increased efficiency ends up competing against itself and will bring down prices to levels commensurate with other similar services.

I don't think we are there yet, but I also don't think we are too far away. Money moves quickly and the manifest interest from mainstream finance is not there for the "love of cryptos", but from the realisation that traditional financial services can now be ignored by enough of the population. I still think they will try to grab control - as banksters have always done throughout history - but that's another story.

What I do expect is something like the world's mature stockmarkets, where there isn't just one dominant stock.