An array of public companies thought they had found a sort of perpetual motion machine: Use your corporate cash to buy up Bitcoin or other digital tokens and presto, your share price shot up even more than the value of the tokens you bought. it was always hard to explain why tokens should be worth more just because they were held by a public company, and the wheels began to come off the car, at first slowly and then much more quickly.

I feel like one thing that crypto is good at is creating bubbles that are obvious at the time, yet hard to short. “This thing is trading above its fundamental value, so I should short it” is sometimes a useful heuristic, but pretty hair-raising in a world where “this thing is trading above its fundamental value so it will probably go up more” is also sometimes a useful heuristic.