Crypto winter is here

Cryptocurrency price declines over a period of weeks and months are usually as predictable as the coming and going of the earth’s seasons. Therefore, crypto investors have accepted that the term “crypto winter” denotes the beginning of a period where it feels like we’re walking through an icy desert. It’s barren, cold, and seems endless. That’s exactly what the past few months have felt like.

Although the largest digital currency is still trading well over $60,000 per coin (a remarkably high price compared to the last five years, for example), it’s safe to say that crypto winter has now begun. After four months of uninterrupted declines since its ATH of $126,000 in early October, we’re down some 50%.

2018

Historically, this still isn’t a true crypto winter (for that, we’d need a drop of more than 70% from the peak), but as there’s no real apparent reason this time, it does feel like the ground has been pulled from under our feet.

Of course, this isn’t the first time the end of a bull run has felt quite aggressive and sudden.

In 2018, Bitcoin dropped 80% from its peak after the initial coin offering (ICO) bubble burst, particularly in Japan and South Korea. That marked the end of an era in which thousands of startups raised billions of dollars with little more than a sales pitch. The Seoul government warned young South Koreans not to invest at the time. Bitcoin initially reached a price of $20,000.

2022

In 2022, the collapse of Terra (the stablecoin) and Luna (the cryptocurrency of the Terraform Labs platform), with a value of $40 billion, led to a series of bankruptcies in the crypto sector. The culmination came in November with the implosion of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX exchange. That ATH was $70,000.

This time, aside from the fact that historically, every Bitcoin bull run usually ends after about a 1,000 days, there wasn’t really a reason. Yet, almost no one doubts it anymore: crypto winter is upon us. Fortunately, this is also a period when you can find bargains if you can identify the bottom.