I distinctly recall last cycle and how the overall market just pumped as a collective whole. This cycle is very different, at least from my point of view. People were obsessed about Solana in 2023 and for most of this year, 2024. Then around the election the market started pumping, BTC and ADA got all the attention. Over the last few weeks, those two consolidated while XRP, XLM and HBAR recently have been raging hard lol.
I think we are still early in the bull run BUT retail is now starting to enter into the space. One thing I am prepared for though is the possibility this peaks much sooner than we may be prepared for. Last cycle, 2020-2021, the market was still cheap in October '20, BTC was at 10k and ETH was around $400-$500 or so. 6 months later BTC was 50k+ and ETH was trading at around 4k. This can happen so fast seemingly out of nowhere that people aren't really prepared and basically get stuck holding the bags.
As for XRP specifically, it's been in the top 10 for years but literally didn't do much, even now it's still only around ATH from quite a while ago, 2017/2018. Meanwhile, you could have easily surpassed this just by buying BTC during that entire time, the safest project in this asset class.