Imo, has been over for at least a year, people just don’t realize it. Lots of investments marked at all time highs after series of up rounds that have little value outside the small groups marking. As a “liquid analogy”, XRP, has never been possible to sell even 5% at market.

2/ to clarify, let’s say a project raises $5m at $50m valuation, then $10 at $100, then $50, at $500m. But…those valuations are all coming from a small group of crypto insiders/VCs all hoping to exit. But little/no demand to buy from those insiders.

3/ same patterns with most NFTs, or a lot of high market cap liquid coins. We get sky high prices on say 5% of token or equity supply as people trade that 5% back and forth at higher prices, but the other 95% is effectively unsellable.

4/ a small % of these projects “cross the chasm” and find new broader market participants willing to buy real size. Those are the fairly rare exception. So we get the kind of “dead man walking” price dynamics where price sits high but with no liquidity as insiders just hold.

5/ again, XRP a good case study here. The exchange price is “real” for some tiny fraction of market cap, but it’s almost all “paper wealth” for the aggregate value. XRP whales spent years working to sell a small % of market cap at ‘current’ prices.

6/ for illiquid assets, investors (and investors in those funds), often believe the marks, and in some cases those marks will ultimately be justified by fundamental growth and true exits will be possible, but infrequent.

7/ one way to think about this is to analogize to wash trading. A hundred people trading 5% of a projects’ tokens back and forth can drive price up 10x, but what then?

8/ practical advice: have to be aware of this dynamic to avoid being the fish providing liquidity to those insiders, say, on exchange listing or anchoring to reported values as the wash traders hope. Either A. Trade small size that you can actually realistically exit, or

9/ B. Be realistic about fundamental value, and own stuff you believe in long-term and view market prices as just temporary opportunities available for specific amounts of liquidity.