Traditionally it’s understood as a bear market when assets trade 20% below their previous high, and yes, it sounds crazy because in crypto that can happen any “normal” day.
That’s why we should start by re-defining what a bear market within crypto is… Some say it is when projects start disappearing, when news of scams and hacks become normal or when projects start announcing layoffs.
What is a Crypto & NFT Bear Market?
Broadly speaking, we can say that the bear market is easily recognizable because in these periods pessimism is everywhere. Funds slow down their deployment of capital, people sell their crypto assets, mainstream news talk about scams, losses or hacks and it’s difficult for projects to grow in users and revenue. Moreover, many of them go bankrupt and the large supply that usually exists during bull markets decreases leaving only a few participants in the market.
We have experienced it multiple times, but there is a great teaching behind these: “The time of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy, and the time of maximum optimism is the best time to sell”.
This phrase applies to both investing and building and that is why today we will talk about the best crypto projects that were founded in bear markets:
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FTX - Crypto Exchange
FTX is a cryptocurrency exchange built by traders, for traders. FTX offers innovative products including industry-first derivatives, options, volatility products and leveraged tokens. They strive to develop a platform robust enough for professional trading firms and intuitive enough for first-time users.
FTX.US uses a maker-taker spot trading model. You can set a limit order, as a “maker,” creating a price at which you want the transaction to occur. As a “taker,” you execute a market order, which results in you completing the transaction at current market prices
- Maker fees range from 0.00% to 0.10%, based on your tier.
- Taker fees range from 0.05% to 0.40%, based on your tier.
In addition to offering crypto and fiat trading pairs, FTX.US also offers a nonfungible token market where creators can mint NFTs for sale, and buyers can make purchases from creators.
FTX.US offers industry-standard security. In addition to cold wallet solutions, the company externally backs up hot wallet funds. Additionally, you’ll have FDIC insurance for funds held in fiat U.S. dollars. But crypto assets, including USDT, are not covered by FDIC insurance.
Their team comes from leading Wall Street quant firms and tech companies like Jane Street, Optiver, Susquehanna, Facebook, and Google.
And they are very good at marketing, actually their activities are HUGE!
And they are very good at marketing, actually their activities are HUGE!
In the span of eight months, FTX signed agreements with the Miami Heat (for stadium naming rights), Major League Baseball (official cryptocurrency exchange, including an FTX logo patch on each umpire’s uniform), the Golden State Warriors (international rights), the Washington Wizards and Capitals (official cryptocurrency exchange and NFT partner), and giant eSports team TSM (naming rights).
OpenSea - NFT marketplace
OpenSea dubs itself the world’s first and largest NFT marketplace. But it’s simpler to say that OpenSea is a marketplace similar to eBay, Etsy, and Amazon, except all the listed items are unique digital collectibles in the form of NFTs that users can buy, sell and mint.
OpenSea was founded in 2017 by software engineers Alex Atallah and Devin Finzer, who became fascinated by the launch of the popular NFT series CryptoKitties and saw potential in NFTs to enable true ownership of digital items for the first time.
When you buy an NFT, it’s yours in the same way groceries belong to you after payment. But what happens when you want to transfer it, sell it, or search for others like it? What if you’re going to buy an NFT but want to view its ownership history easily?
Before OpenSea there was no easy way to do any of these things. Yes, OpenSea is a peer-to-peer NFT marketplace, but it’s also the user interface layer between the blockchain and everyday consumers making NFTs easy for anyone to buy or access.
Ethereum is the most widely used network in NFTs and DeFi but because it saturates so easily, people pay high transaction fees on the network. That is why many opt out and use other networks such as Polygon or Solana which are also accepted within OpenSea.
In Jan. 2022, OpenSea closed a US$300 million Series C funding round led by Paradigm and Coatue, raising the platform’s valuation to US$13.3 billion. While the company said it isn’t actively planning an IPO, hiring a seasoned CFO in 2021 points to that eventuality. Previously, Brian Roberts served as the CFO of the ride-sharing platform Lyft, where he led the company’s IPO, raising US$7 billion of capital.
EOSIO - Blockchain built to support and Operate Safe
EOSIO is an open-source platform that provides industry-leading transaction speeds and a sub-second block time latency rate, allowing developers to perform transactions at a lower cost through efficient resource management.
EOSIO is also designed to allow for a higher degree of configurability, particularly valuable for the creation and management of programmable infrastructures. This allows architects to deploy public or private blockchain networks, and implement a suitable default or custom governance protocol through executable smart contracts.
EOSIO is different from other blockchains because it provides upgradeable smart contracts, and is built on C++.
To secure its blockchain, EOSIO uses a system called delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS).
DPoS uses a real-time voting and reputation system to decide who can create the next block on its blockchain. This means anyone who owns EOS can help operate the network, however, the more tokens you own, the more likely you are to be chosen by the software.
Each EOS token can be locked, or “staked,” to represent one vote that can be used to support development of the platform.
It was founded in 2017 by Dan Larimer and Brenden Blumer, Block.One is the private company that developed the EOSIO protocol. Larimer is a notable name among blockchain developers. In addition to EOSIO, he architected the first decentralized exchange, BitShares, and the first crypto social media network, Steemit.
As the Chief Technology Officer for Block.one, Larimer is the lead architect behind the EOSIO software. He is also known for having created the delegated proof- of-stake (DPoS) consensus mechanism used in the operation of the EOSIO blockchain.
Axie Infinity - Popular play-to-earn game
Axie Infinity is an online game universe revolving around Pokémon-esque creatures known as Axies. Players can collect Axies as virtual pets with aspirations to battle, breed, collect, raise, and build kingdoms for their Axies” says Investopedia.
The game is different from others because it uses a “pay-to-earn” model (also called “pay-to-play-to-earn” model) where after participants pay the starting costs, they can earn an Ethereum-based in-game cryptocurrency by playing. Axie Infinity allows users to cash-out their tokens every fourteen days.
In the Philippines, the prohibitive cost of entry led to the formation of gaming guilds which rented out assets to allow new players meet the minimum requirements. As of June 2021, some people in the Philippines had begun to treat the game as their main source of income. People were feeding their families thanks to a game based on NFTs, unbelievable!
A Smooth Love Potion (SLP), formerly known as a small love potion, is a reward token within Axie Infinity that can be earned by players in certain ways by playing the game in battle or adventure mode. SLP is an ERC-20 utility token that carries a value like other cryptocurrencies and can be bought and sold on a decentralized exchange.
Players of Axie Infinity can also purchase virtual land and other in-game assets as NFTs. The record sale of a plot of virtual land was priced at US$2.3 million, as of 25 November 2021. Gameplay related to purchased virtual land was intended to be introduced by 2020, but this has been pushed back twice as of April 2022. The delays have prompted complaints from users coinciding with a sharp decline in the profitability of the in-game economy.
Bear Market b
Shiba Inu - Shit Coin
Shiba Inu (SHIB) is a dog-themed meme cryptocurrency named after a Japanese dog breed. It was created in 2020 by an anonymous developer named Ryoshi, who designed SHIB to be an alternative to Dogecoin (DOGE) on the Ethereum blockchain.
SHIB is an ERC-20 token with a decentralized exchange called ShibaSwap. The SHIB roadmap and ecosystem also features an NFT art incubator called Shiba Artist Incubator, 10,000 “Shiboshi” NFTs, and an NFT game Shiboshi Game.
The white paper (referred to as a “woofpaper”) for Shiba Inu describes it as a community-based cryptocurrency project. This essentially means that the decentralized Shiba Inu community, known as the “ShibArmy,” is in charge of the cryptocurrency and its development.
Shiba Inu had an initial circulating supply of 1 quadrillion tokens. Ryoshi locked 50% of the token in Uniswap to create liquidity, and sent the other 50% to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s wallet. However, Vitalik decided to burn 90% of the coins and donate the remaining 10% to the India COVID-Crypto Relief Fund.
In terms of value, Shiba Inu started 2021 with a price of $0.000000000119. It hit a peak that year of $0.00008845. Comparing such small numbers is tricky, but an easier way to look at it is that the price had risen more than 74,000,000% in October 2021. It then suffered a major downturn, with the value dropping by more than 75%.
Meme coins have been taking back seats to the larger market capitalization cryptocurrencies, but they started to rise following the “meme stock” trend of GameStop (GME) and AMC Entertainment (AMC) in 2021. In January 2021, a Reddit group named SatoshiStreetBets considered DOGE the crypto equivalent of GME and joked about pumping its price up. As DOGE price took off, traders have turned their attention to the DOGE and other meme coins, looking to achieve gains off the rally. DOGE price was driven up to an all-time high of 73 cents in May 2021, with over 2,000% increase in just five days.
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Flow - The blockchain for NFTs
Bear Market
Flow (FLOW) is a high-performance blockchain specifically for creating NFTs, massive crypto games, and apps. Unlike general-purpose blockchains such as Ethereum, Flow is built to efficiently scale for potentially billions of people interacting with NFTs like in-game items.
Created by Dapper Labs, the same team behind NBA Top Shots and the infamous CryptoKitties blockchain game, Flow is a project in the right place at the right time. The NFT market is booming, and enormously popular social media platforms like TikTok and Twitter are rolling out NFT features.
CryptoKitties, one of the first NFT collections on the Ethereum network founded by Dapper Labs became so famous that it congested the network, bringing transactions to a near halt.
This bothered the creators a lot and instead of looking for another blockchain, they decided to create their own – That’s when Flow Blockchain was born.
Flow uses a proof of stake consensus mechanism that requires validators to stake a certain number of FLOW tokens to participate in the network.
However, the way that validation works is unique amongst blockchains, as Flow splits validation tasks into four separate types of nodes: consensus, verification, execution, and collection. All four node types participate in the validation of each transaction.
Dapper says that splitting up the tasks makes processing transactions more efficient than on rival blockchains. It’s an alternative option to sharding, or spreading out the storage and computational needs of a blockchain across numerous nodes. Flow does not use sharding, and by doing so, Dapper says that Flow keeps transactions atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable (ACID), and allows developers to build on each others’ work.
Flow is split into FOUR node types to achieve dramatic improvements in speed and throughput
— Flow (@flow_blockchain) December 6, 2020
1️⃣ Collector Nodes increase efficiency
2️⃣ Execution Nodes enable speed and scale
3️⃣ Verifier Nodes guarantee correctness
4️⃣ Consensus Nodes ensure decentralizationhttps://t.co/8zFlufRONm pic.twitter.com/7FJoEKSi7K
When Flow blockchain developers created the FLOW token, they envisioned it as the standard digital currency for a new generation of crypto games, apps, and NFTs. FLOW has several characteristics making it a potential winner amongst countless cryptocurrencies, including:
- Sufficient distribution during CoinList community sale.
- Use cases that go beyond governance and staking.
- Deflationary tokenomics as network usage increases.
FLOW has a refreshingly broad array of uses, some of which, like paying for storage rental on the Flow blockchain, give the token its stickiness.
Compound - Best Lending Platform
Compound was founded by serial entrepreneurs Robert Leshner and Geoffrey Hayes, whose previous firm, Britches, aggregated inventory from local shops to be sold on PostMates.
In 2018 Compound raised $8.2 million in funding from notable venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Bain Capital Ventures, the venture-capital arm of the consulting firm Bain.
Compound is a software running on Ethereum that aims to incentivize a distributed network of computers to operate a traditional money market.
One of an emerging number of decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, Compound uses multiple crypto assets to provide this service, enabling the lending and borrowing required without a financial intermediary like a bank.
Put simply, Compound allows users to deposit cryptocurrency into lending pools for access by borrowers. Lenders then earn interest on the assets they deposit.
Once a deposit is made, Compound awards a new cryptocurrency called a cToken (which represents the deposit) to the lender. Examples of cTokens include cETH, cBAT and cDAI.
Each cToken can be transferred or traded without restriction, but it is only redeemable for the cryptocurrency initially locked in the protocol. This entire process is automatic and handled by the Compound code, meaning lenders can withdraw deposits at any time.
To incentivize this activity, Compound uses another cryptocurrency native to its service, called COMP. Every time a user interacts with a Compound market (by borrowing, withdrawing or repaying the asset), they are rewarded with additional COMP tokens.
While complex, the model has so far proved adept at attracting users and encouraging other DeFi cryptocurrencies to adopt its model. As of 2020, over $500 million in assets were locked in the Compound protocol, according to the data site DeFi Pulse.
For more info about Compound check Kraken Article!
BAYC - Early adopters of PFP NFTs
Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), or often colloquially called Bored Ape, is a non-fungible token (NFT) collection built on the Ethereum blockchain. The collection features profile pictures of cartoon apes that are procedurally generated by an algorithm.
Yuga Labs is the parent company of Bored Ape Yacht Club. The project launched with a live pre-sale on April 23, 2021. Owners of a Bored Ape NFT are granted access to a private online club, exclusive in-person events, and intellectual property rights for the image.
Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs cost $190 at launch last April. Now they go for over $400,000!
Celebrities like Eminem, Serena Williams, Stephen Curry, Shaquille O’Neal, and Justin Bieber bought at least one of the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s non-fungible tokens.
Having a BAYC gives you status, and people like that specific recognition, especially if you belong to the upper-class circle.
Some careers require a person to be relevant, so what better way to do that than owning the most well-known NFT in the world,” said Yehudah Petscher, a strategist at NFT data aggregator CryptoSlam.
Yuga Labs, the company behind the NFT collection, has already expanded the ecosystem to include a cryptocurrency (Ape Coin) and a metaverse (Otherside). Beyond that, people holding Bored Ape NFTs are betting that the brand will completely break through and go mainstream. Already it’s collaborated with brands like Adidas and Gucci, and last year a Bored Ape graced the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.
Near Protocol - Blockchain focused on Usability
NEAR Protocol was founded by Alex Skidanov and Illia Polosukhin. Skidanov was formerly director of engineering at the database company MemSQL. Polosukhin previously worked at Google, where he helped develop its artificial intelligence capabilities and search engine products.
Near Protocol is a decentralized application (DApp) platform that focuses on usability among developers and users. As a competitor of Ethereum, NearProtocol is also smart-contract capable and a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain.
Through simple, secure, and scalable technology, NEAR empowers millions to invent and explore new experiences. Business, creativity, and community are being reimagined for a more sustainable and inclusive future.
NEAR is eliminating the barriers to Web 3 adoption. With high speeds, low fees, and progressive UX, NEAR’s climate-neutral blockchain is ready for explosive growth.
NEAR runs in concert with Ethereum, Polkadot, Cosmos, and more, allowing for the free flow of assets and communication between networks for the betterment of all.
Users are typically drawn to Near owing to its unique sharding technology that facilitates fast and secure transactions at lower costs. On top of this, developers choose Near to build apps that require high volumes of activity.
MoonBirds - The project that was successful during the bear market
Since it first hit the scene on April 16, the highly anticipated Moonbirds NFT community from PROOF Collective has attracted nearly $500 million in sales — including more than $200 million in sales in its first 48 hours on the market alone.
And even though the overall volume of NFT sales declined in 2022, the hype is far from over. During this year, however, the trend seems to have shifted from a fragmented market to one where blue-chip and high-end projects take center stage.
Moonbirds is a collection of 10,000 Ethereum NFTs, each featuring a pixelated owl character with randomized traits and features. While there are common elements found across multiple images, no two NFTs are exactly alike.
Holders have access to a private community called the PROOF Collective.
The PROOF Collective is an NFT-based membership club created by Kevin Rose, who is a tech founder (Digg, Revision3) and now a partner at VC firm True Ventures. Rose is a noted NFT collector, and he turned his PROOF podcast into a private community that requires an NFT pass to access. It rewards holders with free NFT drops, access to events and content, and other perks.
PROOF’s mission is to bring together the most innovative minds in the NFT community, including early collectors and strategic decision-makers. PROOF’s members own a collective of 153,940 NFTs, including over 800 Bored Apes, nearly 500 MeeBits, and 148 CryptoPunks, according to its official website.
PROOF released the 1,000 access pass NFTs in December 2021 via a Dutch Auction format, starting at just 5 ETH. Quickly, they have accelerated in value—the cheapest available NFT listed on a marketplace as of this writing is 120 ETH, or about $338,000. PROOF plans to host an NFT conference in 2023, as well as release additional NFTs and more ahead.
Looking for a Crypto & NFT Marketing Agency for your Project?
Crowdcreate is a leading Crypto & NFT growth marketing agency and advisory. Crowdcreate is an award-winning full-service consultancy being named “Top Crypto Marketing Firm” by Forbes, CoinBureau, and Clutch.
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