• Every other cryptocurrency is going to the moon, even those that have zero use cases or are almost certainly scams and pump and dump projects.
• “Buy first, research later” is at an all-time high, and with memecoins now challenging seasoned projects with actual use cases, it’s looking justified to many.

“To the moon!” The period of everything shooting up (to the moon) seems to be back upon us. The first such period was in 2017 when the ICO hype took the market to new heights. The crash that followed the next year was spectacular, and many ‘shit’ coins went to zero, burning investors. But with Bitcoin hitting new records and others like Ethereum following suit, the euphoria is back. Every other coin seems to be doubling, tripling and in some cases going up tenfold overnight once again. Is a historical crash on the way?

“Buy first, research later”

These periods when even the shitcoins shoot up on the charts always stem from one phenomenon – the fear of missing out. Investors are quick to put their money in any other project that pops up as they are afraid of missing out on 100x gains and becoming overnight millionaires.

Just last week, a project that was ideated, developed and launched in two days raised $60 million in less than 24 hours. Anubis DAO was a fork of the more famous Olympus DAO. However, as CNF reported, the money was entrusted to just one individual and it has since gone missing, either through a hack or most likely a rug pull.

One of the investors, who lost $470,000 admitted to not having conducted any due diligence at all before investing. He told one outlet, “We, in crypto, tend to have a ‘buy first, do research later,’ mentality.”

For most, investing in projects with no roadmap, whitepaper, website, known leaders, use case, or any semblance of direction is justified by the kind of success these projects tend to have, That others have invested in these projects and made millions overnight doesn’t help matters. There are endless stories of ordinary Joes who have put in a few hundred dollars and become millionaires.

And then there are the meme-coins. This has been the biggest reason that most have been investing ‘recklessly’ in every other project. Dogecoin showed the world just what was possible. Despite having no use case at the time and openly identifying as a joke coin, it shot up the charts to at one time rank in the top five. It’s now the tenth-largest crypto and at nearly $36 billion, it’s worth more than Nasdaq and HP.

But even Dogecoin pales in comparison to Shiba Inu. The ninth place, SHIB is now bigger than DOGE and has risen more than 100 million percent in the past year! Its claim to fame is that it’s the ultimate DOGE killer – the same DOGE that was built without any use case in mind.

With these memecoins now bigger than projects that have been built for years and which are solving actual problems, such as Chainlink, Polygon, VeChain, Algorand, Stellar and Avalance, it’s easy to see why investing in them is more attractive to investors.

In the past few months, some of the biggest gainers have been the zero-use coins. Just recently, Squid Game shot up over 250x in just three days, leveraging the rise to fame of a similarly-named Netflix series. Dogelon Mars has been shooting up the charts as well, all while claiming to be built by someone sent from the future, in Mars, to save the world. And then there was CumRocket just a few weeks back, which despite some clever PR was just another no-use project. These are just three of hundreds of such coins that are going parabolic on the charts.

Related: Squid Game (SQUID) crypto gains 253x in three days amid investor frenzy

After the 2017 hype period, in which even the shitcoins soared, came the 2018 cryptocurrency winter that wiped almost all of them out. Will 2022 prove to be another such cleansing? Time will tell.