In particular, total capitalisation grew very markedly until reaching a peak of $ trillion in November 2021, three times higher than the previous all-time high of 2017. The market is dominated by traditional cryptoassets; indeed, bitcoin and ethereum account for more than two-thirds of total capitalisation. In Spain, their transaction volume on some estimates amounted to around € billion in 2021.10 Yet they are also much less mature than is generally believed, and still, in aggregated terms this market only represents around 1% of the global financial system. At the same time, we should not overlook the fact that this market is already bigger than the subprime mortgage market was in the run-up to the global financial crisis. And the fact that trading volumes for some of the most representative assets types (including bitcoin, ether and tether) came, occasionally, close to those of the New York Stock Exchange (somewhere in between 70% and 95%). In any event, their high volatility is striking, as borne out by a cumulative loss of value of close to 40% in recent months. These fluctuations are often greater than those of other financial instruments and can also reach much more extreme values. Some studies have flagged the highly changeable nature of the factors underpinning crypto-asset prices and how these factors can be difficult to anticipate given the immaturity of the market.11 This  9  See, for example, N. Daskalakis and P. Georgitseas (2020), “An Introduction to Cryptocurrencies: The Crypto Market Ecosystem”, Routledge, London.
The third cluster encompasses so-called utility tokens, which act as electronic coupons that can be exchanged for future services, products or benefits marketed through the issuer’s own platform. The very capital raised from the sale of these tokens will then be used to fund the development of the forthcoming products or services. In principle, provided their amount remains limited, these will be subject to regulations on consumer protection, online trading, data protection and business operations, but not financial ones. Another classification criteria of the crypto-asset ecosystem has to do with the primary nature of each token. Tokens are understood to be a specific unit of digital value, as assembled by an issuing organization, which further enables interactions between those agents that operate in the virtual space.6 In some cases these are dubbed native tokens since they are created from scratch with no underlying asset. They are further linked to a specific ledger. This is the case of bitcoin and its blockchain network. Given their singularities, the value of these tokens stems essentially from their users’ expectations as to how they may be used in future transactions, rather than, for example, as result of a potential cash flow or their issuer’s fundamentals. In other cases, these tokens are connected to actual real-world assets, be they financial or of another kind. This, for instance, allows real estate assets to be broken down into  3  According to information available at Coinmarketcap.com. 4  Bitcoin is the most notable example.