The Great Crypto Cataclysm of 2022; DON’T PANIC

Sometimes it helps to keep things in perspective.

No, that’s not a cope. It’s not a pointless affirmation meant to help you feel better.

We will all get through the Great Crypto Cataclysm of 2022.

Here’s the deal. The shakeout we’re seeing now is normal and healthy. It’s all part of the show. Think about it. Barely eight months ago people were shelling out seven figures for these ugly things.

Imagine paying the equivalent of a mansion in Beverly Hills, or 15 Lamborghinis, or 12 trips to the edge of space with Virgin Galactic, for a picture of a stupid monkey. Insanity.

The market was clearly ripping through its euphoria phase. Driven by the mania of retail buyers (all fresh off their AMC and GameStop wins, no doubt), the frenzy of endless new coins/tokens, and the glitter of the shiny new tech that many crypto projects promised.

We’ve been here before. In the Dot Com Crash of 2000. When thousands of internet start-ups with little utility beyond a cool domain name and some glitzy marketing went belly-up in the bust. Remember Pets.com? That company went from a Super Bowl XXXIV commercial and a Macy’s Day Parade float to insolvency in about the time it took you to read this paragraph.

Bottom line: There was too much stupid money chasing too many stupid projects in the cryptoverse.

A correction was bound to happen at some point. When you add in the Fed increasing interest rates, inflation eating everyone’s savings alive, and the general feeling of malaise spreading across the world due to Post-COVID adjustments, supply chain problems, and Putin stomping on Ukraine, it all added up to a recipe for economic disaster.

But even in relatively “good times,” crypto has suffered hard, and seen eye-popping drops.

Let’s take a look at a few charts for some perspective.

The chart above gives a broad snapshot of Bitcoin’s last bull run, which started around the beginning of 2017 at a sub-$1000 price point, ending at a top of almost $20k, before finally dropping to a low of about $3400 in early 2019.

Imagine buying at the apex of that run. You’d have had to wait almost three years until your investment got back to even in December 2020.

Such is the world of crypto. It’s volatile. It’s uncertain. It’s speculative. It’s the Wild West. It’s exactly what you signed up for.

But wait, there’s more. It gets even worse.

Imagine instead of plunging into Bitcoin in the last run, you jumped aboard the Ethereum Express. Here’s what you’d have had to contend with:

Starting from a price point in the low teens in early 2017, ETH ran all the way up to over $1,400 within a year. It turned Dan Conway, a mild-mannered corporate middle manager into a decamillionaire in 18 months.

Of course, not everyone will have that kind of luck or timing. Had Mr. Conway held through the peak, he’d have had to endure a stomach-churning 95% drop to the $80 price point by December of 2018.

But had he held through that, he’d have seen ETH run all the way to over $4,700 just three years later in November of last year. A near 3.3X from the previous high in 2017.

Just today ETH has dropped to $1,200, with possibly more room to fall. That’s almost a 75% haircut from its previous high. Bitcoin has thus far sustained a near 65% drop from its all-time high in November last year of $68,000, to it’s current price of about $23,500.

Has crypto bottomed? Is the REAL CRASH still to come? Will we ever see all-time highs again?

Estimates and predictions are all over the place. No one knows for sure. Not me. Not you. But it all feels strangely familiar if you’ve been in the crypto game long enough. Overall, the crypto market cap has been squashed from $3 trillion to about $1 trillion. The post-2017 crash saw a similar downsize from almost $900 billion in market cap to a little over $100 billion.If the past is any guide, we may have a ways to go before the true bottom. Or maybe things reverse shortly from here and go back up.

Point is, it’s been worse before, and we’ve gotten out of the mud eventually. It’s gut check time. Time to reconsider what you’ve invested in and why. And with cryptocurrency lending company Celsius Network freezing withdrawals, it’s definitely time to move your assets off exchanges, if you haven’t already.

Lastly, I’ll leave you with these words of encouragement from a tweet I found just this morning from Lana Miles, Creative Director at Bitcoin Magazine.

Stay safe and aware out there.

We’ll all get through this.