Hmm. Not sure what influencers are the most busy right now... I was thinking mostly the BCH guys and the institutions/governments who flame everything, and to a smaller degree the individual coin pushers. But I'm not really up to date on the matter, the entire crypto subject isn't rally such an interesting one. It's more that one just has to be part of this ;)

Everything 'exploded in the last couple of months.' There are coins that do necessary things Bitcoin could only do if it turned into a different product. If it was up to me, it would be happening right now, but the original Bitcoin crowd seems to be more of the lazy, defensive sandal sort who cannot work up the energy needed, so the brand is getting damaged.
Bitcoin now behaves just like any altcoin, it's in a triangle, idling for days with price fluctuations in tiny percentages. Stasis. What makes Bitcoin special ? 21 Million, or was it billion, trillion, and that it's a legend like Jesus and Mohammed, Ali Baba and human intelligence. Obviously, Bitcoin is too small for the developing market, so the vacuum gets filled by copies, which is entirely natural, and we should try to be as clairvoyant as possible in predicting what human greed rather than ingenuity will drive, as human ingenuity is fickle.

Is Bitcoin a stable coin, is Ethereum ? Don't be a sucker, stay in fiat and let others take risks and make gains. Easy does it, relax, you'll only get frustrated. Let your bank handle your money for you and lose their nerves over it - they know what they're doing. The money industry will of course eventually take over the entire crypto business simply because millions of little suckers never take part in gold rushes for long before they get regulated out. Wait and it's gone. 2018, yes. 2019 ? Not likely.

It took awhile to weed out small business from the Internet, but the money industry wasn't involved - it wasn't even obvious that Internet would be such a big deal - Google had to be founded to get it done, the hit man among the search engines, and it took them ten years with the help of social networks, the loss of Internet neutrality being the coup de grace for the little entrepreneurs. The less educated want egalitarianism now, and make no mistake - herd animals love it and it means nobody can be special except the one percent, it's the natural feudal order of human societies, the Age of Reason was a brief escapade which ends with the Age of Migration and an overall IQ of 80.
Also, it IS obvious that crypto will be a big deal, so expect no mercy... .

XLM has usually been rising along with Bitcoin before Bitcoin stumbled (not in way of this correction rather, its image in the minds of the people), while Ripple reacted antagonistically even in September last year. Now XLM and other altcoins apart from Ethereum behave more independently from Bitcoin... that's good as you have more alternatives in trading, you needn't just sit and wait what happens. No conflict there as long as the market keeps growing.

But the old-style Bitcoin hodlers will be a minority - this concerns me insofar as I would like to see Bitcoin be unique, as the Gold Coin among cryptos, Swiss-made, too expensive to even transact, a status symbol, because we crave this sort of thing, it works well for the human herd animal, status being its prime social mover after individual hunger, sex drive and greed have been taken care of. My coin is better than your coin, I'm better than you. This is why institutions will likely rush into Bitcoin for investment while they will adapt altcoins/tokens for practical use, or copy them. But not now, not yet.
We better use the day.

Crypto needs a professional marketing team pushing them all, but there's none in sight except Roger Ver, and he's a shape shifter. What has changed since Rome was built ? Rome itself was likely built within a few months, a makeshift village on the Tiber, it just took centuries of patient aggression to turn conquest-as-way-of-life into a viable business model and evenually, an empire. They didn't have any remarkable ideas except that concept, even the Gladius came centuries later. Now we have the Kalashnikov, and our glorious ideas are equally insignificant.

So what we learn is that humans are only able to compute a certain amount of information over time, they are completely delusional and will fall for seemingly good news in the face of adverse reality (just watch the Haejin threads here, with their mutual assurances and exclamations), and that they keep being played, because with the death of evolution this is human nature's only remaining game in town. Ant heaps aren't built in a day, and it takes years before they devour themselves, while the individual ants must be very interested in the days and hours passing while that happens. It is very brave to assume that they would be able to ever act rationally as a group.

Let's be patient when there's need, and hurry while we can ;)