It’s not an accident that opportunity and depression are closely linked. One is not possible without the other. Opportunity–real, life-changing opportunity–can only happen at the bottom. It’s that old saying: “Nowhere to go but up.”
This isn’t to say you’re going to retire next week. This isn’t to say the market will turn around in a hot minute and you’ll be seeing green again in the near future. The 2018 draw-down was years in the making, the culmination of a gold rush of euphoric, addictive investments by scads of people, many of whom did not know what they were doing or why they were doing it, other than they just wanted to make a lot of money like everyone else.
I predicted a few months back that by the third Quarter we would begin to shed some of the malaise as regulatory uncertainty was smoothed out and institutional money began flowing into the cryptocurrency market.
We’re already seeing some of that. The SEC has weighed in on
several high profile issues, to a mostly
positive outlook, and I believe that trend will continue. By Q4 I expect we’ll see another rush to the top, an influx of a lot of hands, and new, clear signals from regulatory bodies, which will dictate the movement of the big institutional money, as well as indicate to individual investors how much confidence they might have in their currency of choice.
In the meantime we’re squarely in the shaking out of weak hands–not just investors, but also in crypto projects as well. Are you hanging on? Have you abandoned hope and sold off everything? A lot of people have.
Monday’s newsletter had some links to crypto grave yards, where projects have fallen into disuse and whose value has become effectively zero. This is the culling time. It’s necessary to weed out the dead and dying projects, the ones that brought no real value to the crypto space, and make room for new innovations, new ideas, new capital, and new philosophical understanding of this charged market. That philosophy includes the understanding that crypto will
never be truly viable as a meaningful
currency application until it cracks that most difficult of markets: the human user. And we’re already seeing some cracks at this from big players. Ripple is doing some interesting stuff with
Interledger and
entrepreneur funding. Bitcoin has
lightning network. Ethereum has
sharding and proof of stake coming. And there’s lots of others.
Next week I want to start highlighting some smaller cryptocurrency projects that I believe have promise. I’ve only ever wanted to advocate for projects I believe in, projects that I believe have a possible future and hand in making crypto a more palatable product for mass adoption.
I hope you’re still along for the ride, because this industry is still very young, and we’re filled with the immortal fire of youth. If only you can hang on through the valley, you’ll see the light coming.
Hang on. We’re almost through it.
