Once the fringe province of kooks in tinfoil hats, cryptocurrency is everywhere now. People have strong opinions and both sides are recruiting. If you aren’t strongly pro-crypto or anti-crypto, some overzealous soul at a cocktail party is going to get triggered and want to know why

So why is everyone obsessed with crypto in 2021? Here are five reasons. 

1. FOMO

In early January 2021, cryptocurrency leader bitcoin (BTC) soared to dizzying new heights, tipping the scales at over $42,000 a coin. Sure, it tumbled down to under $33,000 by Friday, but why be so negative? The heady high was a much better sound bite. By March, it was up to $60,000 before taking another tumble.

This isn’t even the first or the most dramatic swing in bitcoin valuation in the last five years. In 2017, the price soared from roughly $1,000 in January to over $20,000 in March (before cratering again).

Conservative financial analysts keep crying “BUBBLE!” It’s hard to blame them. But no less a financial authority than JP Morgan went on record predicting bitcoin valuation surpassing an incredible $130,000 a coin.

Who wouldn’t want to get in on the ground floor of that? Of course, the real ground floor was the 2011 debut of bitcoin, when early adopters picked up coins for a fraction of a cent apiece its entire first year.

But with substantial fortunes made out of thin air, and credible financiers predicting even more room to grow, it’s easy to understand why a subset of the financial world has fallen under the grips of crippling FOMO—Millennial-speak for “Fear Of Missing Out.”

Who wants to be the guy who missed the opportunity to buy BTC at $30k and sell it for $140k? Who wants that to be their cocktail party anecdote?

FOMO is a significant driver of the demand for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. But demand also drives valuation. So the more people rush into the crypto game, the more stratospheric the price spikes become. 

2. Celebrity Endorsements

Few forces drive demand like FOMO, but if anything can rival FOMO as a demand driver, it’s celebrity cosigners. World’s richest man Elon Musk notoriously precipitated runs on various cryptocurrencies, through actions ranging from a cryptic Tweet to a large BTC acquisition by his company Tesla. 

Musk is hardly alone. Pop queen Madonna teamed up with cryptocurrency Ripple to raise funds for her Raising Malawi foundation. Former President Bill Clinton supposedly acquired his first bitcoin in 2016 and has made keynote addresses at Ripple events. 

Other major celebrity adopters of cryptocurrencies include rapper Snoop Dogg, Kiss bassist and mogul Gene Simmons, and billionaire Shark Tank host Mark Cuban. 

For better or for worse, celebrities have enormous cultural clout. They set trends in fashion, social consciousness, and yes—business and finance. Where celebrities go, crowds follow. And in 2021, more and more celebrities are marching to the beat of the crypto drum. And fans are falling in line. 

3. Cultural Identity

In 2021, cryptocurrency is more than an asset, investment vehicle, or feat of tech wizardry—it’s an identity. 

In the western world, traditional identities are fracturing and realigning along polarized lines—political party, race, social class, gender, and sexuality. Everyone seems to be on a personal journey, a quest for an identity they can call their own.

Amid this ocean of identities, cryptocurrency is particularly attractive. It has the roguish, swashbuckling whiff of counterculture, leftover from its anarchist, libertarian, and even outright criminal origins. Remember, bitcoin first caught public notoriety as the currency of choice for The Silk Road and other dark web eCommerce drug markets.

Like all good countercultures, crypto enthusiasts had their own jargon, like “Whale” and “HODL,” as well as their preferred luxury vehicle—the “Lambo” or Lamborghini—to acquire with the spoils of their crypto investments. 

Cryptocurrency conventions attracted thousands of attendees before the pandemic, and you had better believe they will command even bigger crowds as restrictions ease. 

If you feel lost in the world and need a culture to identify with, cryptocurrency is an alluring option for a certain breed of iconoclast. 

4. Volatility

It goes without saying that cryptocurrency is, at present, a volatile investment. Whereas non-volatile investments accrue value like the tortoise—slow and steady—volatile investments are subject to huge swings in value, both upward and downward. 

Consider 2017—bitcoin swung from $1,000 to $20,000 in three months. Or the 2021 peak, followed by a $10k nosedive mere days later. 

Financial planners avoid volatile investments when assembling a conservative, diversified portfolio for average investors. Why bet your retirement nest egg on an asset that could lose 25% of its value overnight?

But for some investors and speculators, the volatility is the point. Say this for crypto—it’s dramatic. For them, watching its valuation zigzag up and down over the course of the day is better than anything you can find on Disney Plus. The heady high of a big gain is like a drug. Even the gut-punch of a dizzying loss has its own addictive quality. 

5. A Vision for the Future

The pioneers who built cryptocurrency on blockchain technology did not envision their brainchild as a new investment vehicle or financial fad. They had a more far-reaching vision, one that has trickled down to even the most casual of cryptocurrency enthusiasts. 

They envisioned a currency uncoupled from any centralized authority—meaning they could not be subject to the tyranny of any government. Diffused over thousands of servers with no authoritarian hand on the wheel, crypto would belong to the people, driven by pure supply and demand and a democratic cultural agreement on its value. 

In this context, it’s easy to see 2021 as a tipping point for the popularity of cryptocurrency. The world is emerging from a near-apocalyptic event. Not in terms of mass death—previous pandemics and natural disasters have been far more deadly than COVID-19. 

But the COVID-19 pandemic was a crisis of institutions. Many of the institutions people trusted—governments, schools, armies, Fortune 500 companies—proved woefully unprepared to help people in need, and willing to take drastic measures to assert control over populations. 

Many people lost trust in their governments during the pandemic. What is the currency of an untrustworthy government worth long-term—especially with governments printing trillions of dollars in an attempt to stimulate their stalled economies?

Right or wrong, cryptocurrency was built on the vision that empires fall, like the Aztecs, the Ottomans, and the Romans before them. When empires fall, the default currency has been gold. Cryptocurrency is a tech-forward attempt to replace gold as the world’s most inviolable currency. 

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For all these reasons and many more, cryptocurrency is here for the long haul. And as more and more people jump on the crypto bandwagon, expect to see more surges in value—more fortunes made quickly, more fortunes lost just as quickly, more breathless headlines about the future of crypto.