The popularity of cryptocurrencies has seen exponential growth in the past few years. It all started with bitcoin, but now, there are over 18,000 cryptocurrencies in existence. This level of growth in such a short period is remarkable and has benefitted early adopters of the nascent industry.
Innovation seems to rise exponentially because most likely it is based on crypto technology available to build on.
More platforms offering more opportunities = more crypto technology is launched
Bitcoin is just a payments system, where you can't really build on and applications are really limited. Applications can be wallets but much more is just not necessary for Bitcoin.
Blockchain 2.0 enables much more applications and developers can select from a wide range of Blockchain 2.0 platforms to build on. Opportunity is growing exponentially currently, because it just is discovered what's possible to use Blockchain 2.0 for.
Especially, more cryptocurrencies means also more applications based on multiple cryptocurrencies, like multicoin wallets, swap platforms, analysis websites and similar.