In a crypto bear market, Fortune favors builders

The last few months have been a trial period for investors across the board, but especially difficult for crypto investors.

After a brief correction in early 2021, the crypto markets seemed ready for the moon. Bitcoin reached a new all-time high of over $ 68k in November 2021, while a total crypto trade of $ 23 billion broke all previous years’ records.

However, the sharp decline in cryptocurrencies in January brought the market to fall below $ 2 trillion, and the continuation of this decline began for his companies with unsustainable business models. The first high-profile crash was Terras Luna stablecoin, which started a domino-like series of implosions.

With the market falling heavily across the board, people are naturally asking if crypto has finally been undone.

Is crypto dead? The short answer: Absolutely not.

In fact, there has never been a better time to shape the future of crypto. According to Citi, the metaverse economy – partly driven by crypto – is set to reach $ 13 trillion and an active user base of $ 5 billion by 2030.

The report predicts a mixture of traditional forms of money and crypto, and notes that money in the metaverse can exist in different forms. But it’s not just economics, NFTs will also play a key role as a form of sovereign ownership of digital goods.

In addition, Morgan Stanley believes that NFTs can represent as much as 10% of the luxury goods market in the same time period.

While the meta-verse is new territory, building in bear markets is anything but a new phenomenon.

Take OpenSea as an example, currently valued at $ 13 billion with more than 1 million active users.

The project was launched in 2017 at the time with groundbreaking NFT projects such as CryptoKitties and CryptoPunks. Almost immediately, it had to face an exhausting two-year bear market that saw the price of Bitcoin collapse by over 80%.

While others mourned / celebrated the “death of the crypt” prematurely, the founders of OpenSea continued to build. After two years of hard work, their KPIs were far from impressive: only 4k users made $ 1.1 million in monthly transactions. But the rest, as they say, is history.

It is no coincidence that other market-defining companies (Coinbase: 2012), platforms (Uniswap: 2018) and protocols (Ethereum: 2015) were falsified in the furnace of market pessimism. How to test good ideas.

It is not widely recognized yet, but we are now entering a period of non-linear expansion thanks to NFTs.

We know that crypto is advancing in waves. So what made the NFT explosion in 2021 different from the DeFi summer of 2020 or the ICO boom of 2017?

It’s simple: NFTs represent crypto-consumer moments.

This means that the emergence of NFTs is the first time that blockchain technology (inaccessible to most people) has made contact with the world of art, culture and entertainment (accessible to all).

While the value of many speculative coins and DeFi tokens is being reset, many collectibles and digital goods with common appeal have maintained their value thanks to genuine demand.

This is crucial, as this demand increasingly comes from ordinary consumers, it has the potential to decouple the web3 market from the problems of “old guard” crypto (speculation, ponzinomics and “number-go-up” business models).

Gaming, digital goods and the meta-verse are in focus for Wall Street and mainstream brands that are accumulating in web3. Not to mention the arrival of high-profile, non-crypto-natives (Snoop Dogg, Jimmy Fallon, Post Malone and many athletes).

The use of NFTs, despite the technical difficulties (and risks) involved, indicates an enormous potential when UX barriers and security issues are resolved.

This potential can be deduced from the increasing number of use cases:

NFTs have unlocked a new creative canvas, which enables a new way to create and make money. We are entering a true renaissance period for art, technology and business, and if you can contribute in any way – as a founder, developer, designer, author, artist, programmer, marketer or investor – the upside is huge. .

Blockchain’s mainstream moment feels like it’s just a matter of time, but it does not become a reality until we create user experiences that meet users where they are.

The next frontier of crypto is to allow the masses to buy, own and trade a digital commodity – one that they really want and use – without ever knowing (or needing to know) that it is stored on a blockchain.

No more seed sentences, hardware wallets or complicated gas interfaces. While these are likely to remain valuable to sophisticated crypto users, the greatest economic opportunity lies in the tools, wallets and protocols that make blockchain interactions feel invisible at the front end.

This will not happen by educating non-crypto-natives. The possibility is to build tools that are safe, intuitive and known for the internet we have always known. And while it’s easier said than done, it’s a once-in-a-generation opportunity for entrepreneurs.

If Opensea could become a $ 13 billion company through the latest bear market with just 1.5 million active users, imagine the possibilities as this number grows.