The word is out now. Crypto is going to grow in popularity with speculators and the current ease of access makes it even more attractive.
Whilst this is the wild west it will all continue to grow and grow.
That and the growing interest and use from every sector and i think this pump may not just be a pump like we saw in 2013 it could be the start of a huge influx of interest in this arena from all types of people for all types of reasons.
Indeed, I'm pretty sure that this is not a giant manipulation, but true influx of new money. And at this point, the sky is not the limit, nor the Moon. However, my idea is that crypto is not what we think it is, and there's something un-real about it.
When we honestly look at the real-world applications of crypto, one cannot say that it has been a big success. Bitcoin was going to be "money", now we know it won't. Bitcoin's real-world currency usage is small. It exists, but it is small, and I don't think, in fact that "replacing fiat" is within its reach, at all. This goes for about all "currency-oriented" crypto: although there are cases where you can use it profitably as a currency, that remains a small niche. We won't be paying Arab oil in bitcoin, nor coffee in bitcoin (nor in litecoin, monero or DASH or....).
When we look at the non-currency style applications, like those on top of ethereum, apart from gambling, not much is really doing something that really works well in the real world. Amazon is not threatened by golem for instance, nor is open bazaar pushing away ebay.
I know, 'give it time', but no. I think the real world usage of crypto is much less than the hope that linux was going to replace windows on PC.
So why are people poring money into crypto, for promises of functionality in the sky that will, most probably, never really happen ?
Is crypto actually not eating away at the fiat market, but rather at the speculative derivatives market ? Is crypto just a speculative toy like complicated derivatives are, where the underlying doesn't really matter, but the financial world just needs "random data" to be able to gamble on with some potential manipulation ?
For the moment, most institutional players have no legal access to crypto, so only the smaller big fish can play, but if it is true that crypto is actually eating a small part of the derivatives gambling industry, then not only the sky is not the limit, nor the moon, but actually Sirius or something of the kind, because the derivatives bubble is HUGE, and if crypto only takes one part per million of it, it would be gigantic.
However, derivatives do have a very complicated, half-virtual/half-self-referential, backing in the real economy. Crypto doesn't: it only has a promise of a megalomania killer application "in the future" (bitcoin was going to replace fiat, ethereum was going to replace lawyers and courts....).
So I won't exclude a big bubble collapse either.