Before I even started writing this post I knew the exact picture that I wanted to use for it. I had to scour through two different cloud storage platforms to find it, but here it is. That right there is the elusive red panda bear and much like the current market we are in, it is a totally different kind of bear.
I snapped this photo at the Columbus Zoo in Ohio back in 2013 and little did I know then I would be using it for a post on a blogging front end that pays me in blockchain tokens.
To be fair, this is only my second bear market, but it already feels a bit different to me than the first one.
During the crypto-winter of 2018-2020, I had just started to get involved in crypto. I had very little in the way of "bags", and bull season was just something I had briefly seen at the end of 2017, but hadn't fully experienced yet.
Looking back now, I should have paid a lot more attention to what people were complaining about at the beginning of the bear cycle. It might have helped me handle this one a lot better.
Perhaps it simply the fact that I wasn't as invested back then as I am now, but at least in my opinion, this bear market feels very unique.
Less hype, more doing
I remember scrolling through Reddit back in 2018 and seeing all kinds of posts about this token or that token. Everyone was shilling something and everyone thought that their token was the best. Maximalism was rampant (it still is in places), but mostly it was all hype.
I don't see that as much this time around. Perhaps the shillers have simply moved to a different platform (Twitter?), but Reddit, Discord, and even Telegram seem less sensational than they did even a year ago.
Instead, what I am seeing more of now is building. It really feels like the focus has shifted from simply getting the name of the token out there to actually creating a use case for coins and letting that speak for itself.
That's the perception I have anyway.
I really feel like crypto as evolved and matured to a point that just having a flashy website and a cool token name isn't going to cut it anymore. People want to see the rubber meet the road, businesses want to see that, investors want to see that, and I think that crypto companies realize that now.
At the very least, they are starting to.
Unfortunately, that still doesn't give us any idea of when this downward trend/stall is going to end. I think it does make it a little easier to handle. Knowing that some of the best blockchains out there are growing, adding features, and implementing innovative ideas gives me a lot of hope for the next bull market.
I think we are getting to the point that bull markets will be driven more by utility and less by hype. Likewise bear markets will be driven more by equilibrium and less by FUD.
That's my opinion anyway. What do you think? Does this bear market feel different than the past one(s)?
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All pictures/screenshots taken by myself or 