It feels like just yesterday when crypto markets last crashed hard. Back in 2022, what had been a wildly careening celebrity- and media-fueled hype train suddenly was a smoldering wreckage. Those were the days of Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud-riddled FTX exchange, which went belly up along with a slew of other big crypto projects. The price of Bitcoin, the largest and most trend-setting of thousands of cryptocurrencies, dropped from its high of over $64,000 in 2021 to barely hitting $17,000 by 2022’s end. Along with Bitcoin, all things crypto sank.

It felt at the time as though we all awoke from a bizarre collective dream in which mass-produced JPGs of cartoon monkeys had sold for prices that rivaled those of an average home, and trading made-up digital tokens on your phone promised to deliver unthinkable riches for the brave of heart. In the wake of crypto’s crash, most people preferred to tune out anything that included words like “blockchain,” “NFTs,” or “Bitcoin.” Even when prices for crypto recovered in 2024, the cringey backwash of 2022 clung on within mainstream public opinion.

And then came Donald Trump.