Tomorrow is the 519 Memorial Day again—I can’t help but feel a bit emotional. Those “old greens” who lived through the Black Swan event 21 years ago probably won’t forget it: the feeling of huge surges and sudden plunges was truly exhilarating. It’s just that nowadays the big pie is being tightly controlled by Wall Street, so it’s hard to see that kind of scene again.

When I look back at the situation during the 519 incident, it really was an unprecedented market crash. Millions of investors’ dreams of getting rich overnight shattered in an instant, and it also sparked deep reflection across the entire crypto community on regulation, risk, and the future.

Looking back, the trigger for that crisis was actually very clear. Musk first invested $1.5 billion in Bitcoin with Tesla, and also announced that he would accept Bitcoin payments—making the whole market feel buoyant because of his actions. Then in mid-May, he suddenly flipped direction 180 degrees: first saying he would stop accepting Bitcoin payments, citing environmental concerns, which caused Bitcoin to drop straight from $57,000 to $46,000. After that, he hinted on Twitter that he might sell his Bitcoin, which fully ignited panic in the market.

But Musk’s statements were only the fuse; the real problem was deeper. In China, the three major associations jointly issued an announcement requiring that virtual currency trading must not be carried out. Inner Mongolia also set up a mining reporting platform. These signals were interpreted by the market as crackdowns, triggering a chain reaction. Add to that the crazy bull market in the four months prior—Bitcoin surged from $30,000 at the start of the year to $64,000, and all kinds of small-cap coins multiplied by several thousand times. The bubble had already grown to an extreme size.

The 519 incident truly erupted from the early morning of May 19 to the morning. Bitcoin was directly smashed from $43,000 to $30,000, a drop of 30%. Ethereum was even worse: it fell from $3,300 to $1,900, down 42%. Market sentiment instantly flipped from greed to fear. Investors rushed to sell, and exchanges also experienced downtime and lag; many people didn’t even have time to close their positions. The fear index shot up to 0.8, the greed index fell to 10, and the market was completely thrown into collapse.

However, the recovery was fairly fast. By the afternoon of May 19, some people started buying the dip. Bitcoin rebounded to $40,000, and Ethereum returned to $2,800. From the most desperate moment, the whole market gradually began to regain rationality. After that, it entered a consolidation phase: the market gradually stabilized, and investors also started to reconsider the value of cryptocurrencies.

Now that I look back on the 519 incident, it really was an extreme manifestation of market sentiment. In bull markets, greed gets amplified infinitely; in bear markets, fear gets amplified infinitely as well. This crisis also helped people in the community better understand the importance of risk management. It’s just that the market structure has changed now—large funds have entered—so it’s indeed less likely that a purely emotion-driven, frenzied scene like that will happen again.