Crypto Winter Has No End In Sight

It’s been two weeks since the latest cryptocurrency/blockchain conference in New York, where the mood was “as usual” for crypto – the future is ours. Just keep calm “hodl” on. But roughly seven business days after the Messari Mainnet Conference in Manhattan, cryptocurrency investments still stink. Ethereum
ETH
, whose investors had hoped that “the merge” would help their investment turn the corner, is down over 65% year-to-date. Perhaps the good news is that since the New York conference, both ETH and bitcoin are beating the Dow. Given the dour market, it’s nothing to write home about.

David Morris, who attended the conference last month as both guest and moderator, called this the “most important crypto bear market in history.”

“The trap for many crypto projects is that while the big, easy returns come from whales and (day traders), those users are also hyper-agile ‘rotator capital,’ willing and able to pull up stakes and move their entire net worth to a new system for a few extra basis points of APR,” Morris says.

Some industry leaders were excited about “regulation” – which seems anathema to crypto. Granted, the serious cryptocurrency/blockchain developers want regulation insofar as it lends their segment of the tech world some credibility. Regulation means ‘you can trust us, we’re not doing scam coin projects.’

So when Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, known as “CZ” in the crypto world, told Mainnet gatherers that governments are making “positive progress” toward regulation, one understands it to mean that investors can trust Binance – they welcome the scrutiny.

The thing is, CZ and the like have so much money in bitcoin from the early 2020s (remember, BTC was under $10,000 before Covid panic set it) that they can cash out some of those losses and throw lavish parties…