I am still freaked out by the total volume in alts. Does it not seem fishy to anybody else?
I'm willing to accept the premise that it seems to be flowing from ETH as that dump continues. But if you look back to January 1st, the total market cap in alts has gone from less than a billion to more than $1.5 billion. That's a 30%+ jump and it's more than $500 million in new money.
Where is THAT coming from...and WHY? That's a pretty big reallocation of capital, but from where? Doesn't seem like it could be hedge funds and other financial players because Central banks are in stimulus mode.
A lot of that is out of thin air. Just because marketcap goes up 500 million does not mean 500 million was invested. The value was created from a much smaller amount of money being used to push prices up. In fact a lot of altcoins are premined so hard that the founders can push the marketcap to millions of dollars with only a few thousand dollars worth of investment. It's pretty artificial.
That being said, the volume on poloniex has been pretty amazing lately. The volume is real, but a part of it surely is due to leveraged trading and that wasn't widely used in the altcoin 1.0 era. I think it's reasonable to assume that the big FUD storm regarding bitcoin blocksize had made more bitcoiners interested in diversifying into altcoins, I've notice a trend of high profile bitcoin figures voicing support for various altcoins or jumping on the BTC FUD train. There's a lot of wealth in bitcoin, and only a small fraction of the bitcoin community is needed to create the volume we see on poloniex.