Which is why I mention the continuous month-on-month declines. January trading lower than December is expected. But February lower than January? March than February? April than March? That trend line implies more than just a bubble popping.
The study of bubbles commonly features exchange failures. A bubble popping doesn't make declining volumes any more comfortable for Coinbase.
Actually it does, since it gave them a cushion of $1 billion in revenue that should last a good while.
In contrast to the stock market, where bull markets are long and gradual but bears are short and steep, crypto bull markets tend to be short and steep and the bears long and gradual. This is because crypto market penetration, in the grand scheme of things, is tiny. I've heard it quoted at 1% before. So when there is new news, lots of people crowd in and bump the price up rapidly, and then once the news cycle dies down, they gradually forget about Bitcoin and eventually give up on it.
However, among the speculators are a small minority of people who are actually building things with cryptocurrency. When their projects launch and find an audience, they end up kicking off the next crypto bubble. That's why each bubble has been larger and more broad-based than the previous one, and why they seemingly happen at 2-4 year intervals (2-4 years being the time it takes to build a real product and find customers for it). Coinbase itself was founded in 2012 in the midst of the bear market following the 2011 bubble. Ethereum (which kicked off the ICO craze) was founded in the 2014 bear market following the 2013 bubble. Somewhere among the 1900 ICOs funded in the 2017 bubble will be the seeds of the 2019-2020 bubble, which will likely be the bubble to end all bubbles.
A very similar pattern happened with the dot-com bubble, which people remember today as the period in 2000 where everybody was going public on zero revenues. But people who didn't live through it often forget that there were mini-bubbles before then: there was a run-up in '98 (which, incidentally, is when Paul Graham sold ViaWeb and got the money to fund this site), and there was the initial boom that kicked it off with Netscape's IPO in '95.