There are many speculations about the reasons of this crash. For example, the manipulation of great whale and, or other interest groups. By analyzing the recent news, we can see the timeline of some events are certainly in relevance to, and coincide with the timeline of major changes in marketplace, such as:
On September 5, Bloomberg reported that Goldman Sachs planned to deploy a Bitcoin exchange (Later on September 7th, Goldman Sachs CFO declaimed the truth of the news). Also the global cryptocurrency fraud incidents, manipulations of altcoins and the forecasts by experts and celebrities. In fact, early messages are only declassified to large holders(great whales) for pulling and slapping the market trend before the individual investors receiving the late news after the marketplace has undergone manipulation.
In 2017, 209 ICO projects raised a total of $3.695 billion according to Citicoins, in contrast to 686 ICO projects increasingly raising a total of $17.849 billion (500%) by August 2018. From the data, the amount of funds has indeed achieved a great growth. However, many of those ICOs and projects are worthless, with fraudulent and money-making scam. The scam project parties will eventually quit the market after archiving funding goal, and seriously damage the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Major issues plaguing the cryptocurrency market are fraud and ICO scams. Of course, there are still some righteous projects that really want to voice out, but they have to overcome the difficulties to prove the values of their tokens through technological explanation and orientation. If ICO continuously to follow the current trajectory, the bubble will burst to extinction and the industry will experience a wide reshuffle.
Regardless, most cryptocurrencies comes from the feasibility of the ultimate goals and practical application. As the earliest cryptocurrency, Bitcoin value has been proven through integrity, fairness (white papers and open source), effectiveness, and the adoption rate. Although Ethereum market performs not so well so far, it is still one of the most successful challengers to Bitcoin. The Ethereum project stimulates the development of the idea of “blockchain-as-service” and provides a platform for constructing new effective tokens - powered by “Ether”.
There are also emerging competitors, such as Litecoin (LTC), which provides many key functional applications associated to Bitcoin and intends to become substitution for Bitcoin. Litecoin officials stated that Litecoin markets had the practical value for legit currency trading and will be driven by its specs of high speed and low cost transaction.
Securities(finance) tokens also emerged in cryptocurrency and has been reportedly played an important role in the market crash triggered on January 2018. These digital securities contracts were sold on December last year and expired on January 2018, and coincided rhythmically with the switching between the bull market and the bear market. In the past year, there has been a lot of news about securities(finance) tokens, and the government is working with independent project agencies to try to regulate or otherwise prevent risks and fraud to protect financial security issues. Cryptocurrency is a new industry. Innovation always comes with chaos - lack of supervision, and market manipulation. In the environment without regulation, the issues cannot be certainly changed for a while, and they can only wait to prove and improve the value of the industry.