Crypto investors are encouraged not to panic; it’s innovation, not a bubble
Crypto investors across the world are rightfully stressed about the current state of the market. It’s easy to look at events over the last week, which saw market trends threaten to drag major cryptocurrencies down 60 per cent or more, and want to cut the losses and sell out.
This is certainly one of the biggest crashes that we’ve seen in crypto to date. However, many are holding firm to the long term promise of crypto, and predict that this is going to be remembered as nothing more than a blip.
“Crypto is going through the lull that the Internet went through,” investor, Mark Cuban, has tweeted. Cuban is a celebrity billionaire entrepreneur and investor, and one of the lead sharks on the popular startup investment show, Shark Tank.
Cuban’s reading of the current state of the crypto market draws parallels to the dotcom crash… and then highlights just how much of our spending now transacts over the Internet. That market recovered and rebounded in a transformative way, Cuban argues, and so too will Crypto.
“After the initial surge of exciting apps, NFTs, DeFi, P2E, we saw the imitation phase as chains subsidized the movement of those apps to their chains (ala bandwidth and storage subsidies by startups in the 2000s).”
Cuban, then, seems to be holding firm. Outside of the investments that he has made through Shark Tank, some 80 per cent of his investments are tied up in crypto-based businesses. Cuban was able to sell his principal dotcom business, Broadcast.com, for close to six billion just before the bubble burst, so he knows when to get out of an ailing sector at the right time, and so far he hasn’t announced any exits from crypto.
Meanwhile, one of the two nations that have made Bitcoin an official national currency, El Salvador, has decided to invest its way through the downturn. The country has reported to have spent US$15.5 million on acquiring another 500 Bitcoin. This brings its Bitcoin reserve to 2,301 coins, a holding worth US$71.7 million, but if Bitcoin recovers to its November 2021 value that holding would be just shy of $157 million.
So while the crypto downturn is significant, and cause for concern for investors, those that aren’t too exposed with their portfolios have good reason to hold on to the currency. For now, the bulk of the serious investors see this as an Internet crash, rather than the Tulip bubble – the market’s not going away and will recover.
