Polygon, Cosmos or other innovative L1 projects like Avalanche, Algorand or HBAR all sit at 9 digit mcap - which is certainly very high but still annoyingly low when you consider that DOGE is worth 77 billion dollars and BSC, whose sole purpose is to make scams out of ETH projects and run them on a centralized chain, sits close to 100 billion dollars.
People have completely lost the value of money, do you realize how much money is $4.5 billion?
In 2007 Apple had a market cap of 80 billion and a P/E ratio of 26, it had revolutionary products on the market that were clearly going to change an entire industry while at the same time bringing in steady revenue, can you imagine how much it would be worth today in this bubble?
I could not agree more, I've been so heated over the last year looking for any sort of rationale but this greed fueled fake currency explosion is driving me insane. I understand the tech, I don not understand the hype.
you need to adjust for inflation if you're going to use a valuation that is 14 years old.
Scams are big business, but that just illustrates how delusional and bubbly these are; is BSC, a thing I'd never heard of before, really of equivalent value to .. Square? Lockheed Martin? Target? AirBnB? AMD? NTT? Uber?
Gas costs in ETH have been at historical highs, making it uneconomical for players under 5-6 figures of capital to do basic transactions, let alone yield-farm / manage positions, so various DeFi dApps have moved over to less congested chains like BSC and Solana.
Sure, lots of scam projects due to cheaper deployment costs (again low gas fees vs Eth), but legitimate projects too: see PancakeSwap, which started out as a Uni clone, but has arguable expanded to offer more / different set of features.
Speaking more broadly, yes, we're in a crazy bubble, but that's really the case across all asset classes at the moment due to rampant central bank printing. Scams are proliferating in equities too, see SPACS.
Not to trot out the "this time is different" meme, but unlike the '17/'18 cycle, you have far fewer whitepaper copy-pasta scam ICOs and way more legitimate projects; with real teams, real users, real use-cases. Plus, institutions are actually ape-ing in, so take that for what you will.
IMO pace of development and adoption will only accelerate from here on the back of an already "mature" internet and mobile ecosystem + generational familiarity/acceptance of digital value in the youth.
As someone who grew up during the transition from analog-digital, crypto gives me mega 90s/00s internet vibes, especially the feeling of inevitability around the DeFi space.
The second most valued crypto-currency is Ethereum. And the entire ecosystem around it does plan on doing a lot of things, starting with decentralised finance.
There are also efforts to layer a network on top of Bitcoin in a bid to counter-act Ethereum. And competing networks like Diem (Facebook, Spotify, Uber...), CENTRE (Coinbase / Circle...), Stellar (Stripe...) that aim to replace the current payments infrastructure.
Then there are cross-chains like Polkadot, Cosmos, Polygon et al that try to make all of these disparate blockchains inter-programmable.
Agree that pump and dump schemes seem like the norm, but that's like saying Internet has no utility and is crap because there's porn, spam, and malware all around.