I wasn't investing in Cryptos back during 2017, only started by investing into IOTA in early December 2017, and now also in ITC coin (the Chinese IOTA) 2days ago.
During 2017 basically every single crypto coin rose thousands of percent though, with the majority of that surge coming during the Autumn.
But so what was going on in the crypto galaxy during 2017 (and especially the autumn) that caused those huge constant up moves, which is now missing from the crypto world??
The main reason for the growth of the crypto market had to do mostly with the fact that bitcoin finally was able to approve segwit, it took us a lot of time and drama but it happened, after the BCH fork many people thought bitcoin will go down and at first it did but the hype was too much, eventually alts became undervalued and people began to invest in them, so bitcoin was able to rise all the markets by itself and that is going to happen again once we have the LN.