But look beyond the bullish headlines and the rally in bitcoin, and a vastly different landscape comes into view. Most of the so-called altcoins once touted as competitors to the original crypto asset are nursing steep declines, with more than US300-billion of market value wiped out so far this year.
The sea of red points to a wider malaise that's forcing parts of the industry to confront existential questions. Crypto was imagined by early enthusiasts as a universe where a host of coins competed for investor money, offering a diverse set of use cases. But as bitcoin reigns supreme, that's giving way to predictions that large swaths of the sector will become a digital wasteland.
"I think they're just going to die, frankly," Nick Philpott, co-founder of trading platform Zodia Markets, said of altcoins. "They'll just wither away. Technically, a lot of this stuff will just sit there and gather dust in perpetuity."
Bitcoin's share of the total market value of crypto assets has climbed by nine percentage points this year to 64, the highest since January 2021, according to CoinMarketCap. Back then, cryptocurrencies were a largely unregulated space, crypto lending was roaring with few safeguards and non-fungible tokens were just starting to take off.
What's different this time is that crypto is becoming a more regulated, institutionally-driven marketplace, and that stablecoins appear to be the only tokens with a real shot at achieving means-of-payment status, due to the fact that they eliminate volatility.