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.
margin trading leverage
I think this is the main thing that has changed. Polo is now the largest alt exchange and they just added margin trading several months ago. People woke up and realized they don't even need any new money to open new positions. And when they do open positions, they can open bigger ones with the same amount of capital.
Also Ethereum is something new that has attracted more new interest to the sector than anything in a while. Previous hot alts like Bitshares and Nxt were similar in their day, but that was years ago. Nothing since.
These two together have been explosive in terms of volume.