Today Coinmarketcap turned red, again. It has been doing this for a couple of weeks now and although there is every sign that the markets will get back up again. as this is a yearly recurring event, probably initiated by the Lunar new year.
Let's have a look at the total market caps of January months of the last three years.
2015 started off quite well while the market moved sideways for a few days, but then the trend was bearish for a couple of weeks before it started to move up again.
2016 actually started off even better but took a huge dip halfway before it started to move up again. I haven't been in this for too long but here it also seems that here and there some exchanges were added and removed (see the dip around the 13th and the spike on the 24st). This year something similar happened when Coinmarketcap decided to remove the Korean Exchanges on the 8th of January this year.
2017 found a very successful start with a spike to an all time high on the 5th of January, before starting on a bear run to about 2/3rd of the month before it corrected back again quite well. This was also the only of the three years that saw a higher market cap at the end of the month than at the start. It had it dips as well however.
Now, looking at this past January I don't think we have anything to worry about in terms of growth, taken into account the numerous dips this month and the decline along the complete market. Especially looking at total market cap numbers, we are at astronomical numbers when you compare it to the last couple of years in which so much growth happened. We've seen a growth of:
- 5,6 Billion capitalization on January 1st, 2015
- 7,2 Billion capitalization on January 1st, 2016
- 17,7 Billion capitalization on January 1st, 2017
- 600 Billion (!!) capitalization on January 1st, 2018
Taken all this into account, I think this past month could mean one of two things. Either crypto caught mainstream success which is going to keep it going on a bull run for a lot longer, or it might mean that it has grown so much too fast that it needs a few months of correction to stabilize and recover in order for it to cool down and set up for another surge. A few months ago I actually stumbled upon a piece of data visualization (that was actually used recently by Altcoin Buzz as well to make a certain point) that makes me very confident that we haven't seen the last of this growth yet. Here http://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-money-markets-one-visualization-2017/ we can see that the market for Bitcoin (but for crypto as a whole) is nothing in the grand scheme of things. Just take a look at that, every time you get the urge to opt out of your cryptocurrency.