It feels like just yesterday when crypto markets last crashed hard. Back in 2022, what had been a wildly careening celebrity- and media-fueled hype train suddenly was a smoldering wreckage. Those were the days of Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud-riddled FTX exchange, which went belly up along with a slew of other big crypto projects. The price of Bitcoin, the largest and most trend-setting of thousands of cryptocurrencies, dropped from its high of over $64,000 in 2021 to barely hitting $17,000 by 2022’s end. Along with Bitcoin, all things crypto sank.

It felt at the time as though we all awoke from a bizarre collective dream in which mass-produced JPGs of cartoon monkeys had sold for prices that rivaled those of an average home, and…