Is the Crypto Winter Far from Over?
In this blog, I approach the topic of crypto ups and downs as, first and foremost, a blockchain developer and a builder of Web3’s future. Hence, some numbers outline how much the market of decentralized applications has grown in the past few years. DappRadar reports there are 12,495 dapps across all chains with at least one active user in the previous 24 hours. This represented an increase of 1200% from 2018 when there were just 1,000 active dapps.
Now, crypto has avoided big price swings since July 2022 up until the FTX filed for bankruptcy on November 11th. In such cases, prices suffer from speculation and bad management, not the underlying blockchain technology. As a result, investor trust in the digital asset class has been harmed by the unfortunate circumstances surrounding FTX. And remediation will take some time.
What’s a crypto market cycle and market sentiment?
One thing to note is that crypto is cyclical. Its value is determined by: Global Liquidity + Value of the Underlying Technology. That’s why crypto users define general trends of the crypto market as a crypto market cycle.
Three key facts about the crypto market cycle:
- It has four stages: accumulation, markup, distribution, and markdown.
- The average length of a crypto market cycle is four years.
- The correlation with Bitcoin, the halving of Bitcoin, and social metrics are the major variables that impact a crypto market cycle.
Moreover, the cryptocurrency market’s behavior is very emotional — the crypto world is dominated by market sentiment. Greed usually leads to bullish trends, while fear results in bearish trends. Moreover, crypto users often become greedy when the market rises, leading to FOMO.
What can the Fear & Greed Index tell us?
The Crypto Fear and Greed Index puts overall market emotion into perspective, since fear and greed impact investors’ willingness to pay. The Index draws sentiment data from market volatility, market momentum, social media, surveys, bitcoin dominance, and Google trends. Also, it’s a great way to tell when a low point in cryptocurrency prices has developed and when a rally may take place. It is very helpful when the market is experiencing new and sudden developments.
So, how does one read this index?
- 0–24 = Extreme Fear
- 25–49 = Fear
- 50–74 = Greed
- 75–100 = Extreme Greed
Main traits of the crypto cycle phases
The state of developers’ activity during the turmoil
Even though the prices of Ethereum and Bitcoin dropped by almost 70% in November 2022 when compared to November 2021, development activity on the major networks is at its highest. Despite the collapse of FTX and Luna, and the market’s volatility, blockchain technology grows no matter the conditions and becomes more valuable daily. Ecosystems are expanding — we can witness a linear growth of dapps and developers across the networks.
I see that today developers are working faster than ever to create blockchain-based apps, despite a sharp decrease in crypto values. We also witness all-time highs in development activity, which does not look like winter to me.
According to the Alchemy Development Report, only 146,000 developers installed Ethers.js and/or Web3.js weekly in 2018. By 2022, this figure reached a staggering 1,536,548 downloads every week — Q3 of 2022 had a 3x increase in downloads compared to Q3 of 2021.
I second the view by Jason Shah from Alchemy that in a couple of years, the world will see a new niche for crypto-native businesses that could only have been built thanks to blockchain tech. And even now, big corporations like Adobe, Facebook, and Stripe are starting to pave their way into Web3.
The outlook for INC4 blockchain development
When thinking closer to home, all developers at INC4 are busy building and delivering new features and technical updates for all our current projects. These include PembRock Finance, the Open Forest Protocol, the Air Dao, GYNN.io, Spaceport Docking Station, Minerall.io, and others. And you may ask why.
We continue BUIDLing despite market conditions to produce high-quality decentralized products that will help onboard more people into the crypto ecosystem and Decentralized Finance (DeFi). I know that mass adoption of blockchain is possible, but it requires users’ trust in the technology. This way, we want to increase the trust and loyalty of users by bringing them new features and tools no matter what.
