The bear market is called the bear market because bears hibernate during winter, which is generally regarded as a period of slow growth. However, according to some, the reason why it’s called a bear market is because of the old saying “you don’t sell a bear’s skin before you’ve caught the bear“. This means you don’t count your eggs before they’ve hatched. If you do sell a bear’s skin before you’ve caught the bear, you might find yourself in quite a lot of debt. No one wants that, but the bear market doesn’t care about who wants it or not; it comes anyway.
The bear market might be a bad time for many crypto traders. It’s certainly a bad time if you’re trading futures and depend on crypto-assets reaching astronomical heights. The truth is that the summer of all-time highs has passed, and it’s now the winter of some all-time lows. So this is not an attempt at gaslighting crypto traders. You’re not dreaming, and this isn’t some pseudo bear market. It’s the real deal.
Terrible things happen in the bear market. LUNA, for example, has shown what can happen if your entire protocol is based on an assumption that black swans are extinct. Celsius has taught many people, once again, the first fundamental lesson of crypto; not your keys, not your coins. And Bitcoin is showing many others who just jumped on the bandwagon that good times don’t last forever.
However, despite what your favourite anti-crypto social media influencer is saying, this bear market isn’t some catastrophic occurrence that will irrevocably change things. There’s a very high possibility that this bear market will not be remembered by many in the next ten or twenty years. If there’s anything the last twelve years of crypto have taught us, it’s that the economy is beyond resilient. Its decentralized nature means it can take any number of shocks and will remain standing.
And this bear market is just one of those shocks. If you aren’t a crypto trader feeding off short-term gains and all-time highs, this market may be nothing more than a slight inconvenience for you. If you’re particularly liquid, it may be a chance for you to snap up a stake in great projects for less than five to ten times its proper price. All you need to do now is go shopping and wait out the storm.
If you’re a founder, there’s probably no better time to build than a bear market. Yes, bull markets are indeed great for investments. But bull markets are also the perfect time to get lulled into a false sense of security. And there is hardly anything more injurious to founders than a false sense of security. During the bull market, startups went on an overly expensive hiring spree. Companies that hadn’t developed a product-market fit took out huge advertisements and spent a huge chunk of their funding on marketing.
Some founders even forgot that their project was supposed to solve problems, not just be popular. Today, many of those startups are getting reintroduced to the grind, and it has been a tough lesson for them.
New founders and startups that are just starting in this climate will find out two things fairly quickly; they will discover that VCs are not loyal to dreams, and they will find out that nothing beats building lean. With the bull market out of the way, the scope of the problems in need of solving will be bigger than ever, and the motivation to solve those problems will be stronger too. Bull markets tend to impose laziness on market players. It also has a penchant for making market players have an awful laissez-faire attitude towards resources and excess. A bear market cuts all of that out.
For Ankr, the bear market is a time of unique opportunity to build a closer relationship with developers and founders. The lack of noise in the economy means that devs can see what solutions will stand the test of the bear market, and how to iterate around those solutions. If something sticks around during the bear market and continues to prove its usefulness, then you can know that it will be even more useful when the market returns to normal levels.
At Ankr, our principles remained solid throughout the bull market, and are even stronger during the bear market. Our goal is to be the best partner for devs and founders in Web3, and that’s precisely what we are and will continue to be. It’s difficult to have partners that consistently innovate throughout market phases, and that is exactly what Ankr is for all of our clients.
Even now, we recently unveiled two innovative solutions to help our clients develop better solutions during these times. Our new PAYG model ensures that you don’t have to spend a dime of your resources on services you did not access, and our new app chain is set to change the way you develop dApps forever. With Ankr’s app chain, you’ll be able to build your dApp on your custom-built blockchain, with your own rules, your design, and your specifications. If you’re looking for a solution to make your dApp scale quicker and avoid all the troubling congestions of chains like Ethereum and even layer-2 chains like Polygon, then Ankr’s app chain is the solution you need.
The bear market can be lonely and disappointing. However, it can be a time for deep introspection and clear-headed decision-making. It can also be the time to help your project become more efficient and solid. If you have the right partners, have the right decisions, you can come out of the bear market victorious over the bear and stronger than ever. The bear market can be good actually, for you.
