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Crypto is uncool now. And for an asset class based on vibes, that's a big problem. Bitcoin is down about 45% since October. The market value of all cryptocurrencies has fallen by almost two trillion dollars. But crypto has crashed before. So why do its biggest fans see more despondent than ever? They're sad because they're lonely. The last time crypto crashed, investors could take comfort from the fact that others were nursing losses too. The NASDAQ fell by a third in 2022. This time, tech stocks are only slightly off from their all-time highs, even though software stocks have taken a hammering recently. There are some simple explanations for this divergence. One is leverage. By late September, borrowing against crypto assets had more than doubled in a year when prices dropped. Around $19 billion in leverage bets were liquidated in a couple of days. New products that were supposed to boost the crypto market have turned against it. What a shed moment for the crypto industry happening today. Crypto ETS launched a great height in 2024. The hope was that they would introduce a large pool of new buyers. But those more mainstream investors have pulled billions of dollars of their money out. Now, those outflows are pulling prices further down. But there's a deeper, less tangible problem too. The vibes are off. For a speculative asset with no fundamental value or income generating potential, the aura is everything. And the cooler lure crypto once had has worn off. You can buy Bitcoin funds using the same brokerage account your granddad uses. The president of the United States has launched his own coin. How counter-cultural can crypto really claim to be now? These days, the buzz has moved to AI. It's no coincidence that Bitcoin miners like CoreWeaf have long since pivoted to providing AI infrastructure instead. Charles Hoskerson, a co-founder of Ethereum, put it this way. We all just basically became part of the system. And you know what the system does when you become part of it? They make it not cool. The cruel irony is that while crypto feels like it's become part of the establishment, professional, straight-laced investors still won't touch it. A bank of America survey found that the vast majority of fund managers still have no allocation to crypto at all. Digital assets made up 0.4% of their total portfolios, even at the peak of the market. Crypto has survived every craft so far, but it's never had to survive being boring.