Amidst all the chaos and drama of the chain and community split in Bitcoin Cash, it’s impossible to ignore something even more compelling: the markets are still down. All the predictions of how long the bear market would last aside, it looks like we’re going to be hanging around low points for a little while longer now. That’s because true recovery happens on the downswing first. We won’t see a significant turnaround in general until we see a turnaround in specific rankings.
There’s no swimming against the current in the “centralized market”
Like it or not, the market performs largely as a unit. That’s the way it’s going to be while cryptocurrency is still unproven technology. When hype is running rampant, everything goes up, even (sometimes especially) unsound projects. When there’s a crash, it hits everyone. Before whole industries are using the technology for day-to-day operations, we won’t see many spared from crashes affecting other, weaker players in the game.
Some of the heaviest hitters in the market failed to live up to the hype
There’s no avoiding it: many of the most prominent projects in the space have earned the crash for the rest of them. Bitcoin promised to be digital money for the world, but much of its usefulness ran into a brick wall with scaling problems, and it hasn’t been able to recover since. Ethereum has yet to figure out how to provide the practical applications it intended to at scale and cost. Litecoin similarly failed to scale, and provided nothing beyond what Bitcoin promised. Now we even see Bitcoin Cash, born out of a desire to move on and recapture real use cases and adoption, lose viability and certainty during an ugly hash war. If investors are simply checking out how the top 10 are doing, it’s no wonder they’re dumping before looking further.
Underperforming market leaders need to take a back seat before recovery
Before we can expect to see a significant turnaround in market sentiment, there needs to be confidence in cryptocurrency, and in order for that to take place, there needs to be confidence in its biggest stars. As already mentioned above, the most prominent players have not yet lived up to expectations. They must either turn their fortunes around, or be replaced, before any meaningful progress can happen. A market led by a half-dozen projects with consistent track records of performance in their respective specialties will lift the rest of their peers up, and the sooner we get around to building and identifying these future frontrunners, the better.
Let the game of “last coin standing” begin
How do the new stars of the crypto world go from obscurity to top-ranked positions when the whole market is not reacting to good news? Through surviving. The tanking of the market is proving incredibly tough for the space as a whole, but it’s far worse for the projects without sound fundamentals. The newest and greatest will stand out by simply still being there, and we’ve already noticed that some of the stronger ones tend to take lighter losses. It’s simply a matter of the projects with strong tech, great teams, real use applications, and relentless promotional pressure keeping on pushing forward while everything else is in a state of atrophy.
Welcome to crypto winter. Who’s ready to tough it out and make it to see springtime?
