Short answer, YES.
Someone tweeted that this is the worst crypto market condition they've ever experienced and I'm honestly inclined to agree with them, why? I've been in crypto for a little over 8 years, and the market was bad in 2022 and 2019.
In 2019, it was mostly terrible dumps without anyone knowing why (most people in 2019 were noobs) and in 2022 it was FTX crashing and Luna depegging. This was also followed by CZ Binance going to jail, someone taking over and people selling off all their crypto because they thought it was over.
You'd think that people would be scared of crypto when COVID happened, but then I realized that the world can be on fire and others can be dying but if those portfolio is in green, there's no way they'd panic sell. So basically 2022 was straight up scary, but guess what?
In 2023 and 2024 the likes of HYPERLIQUID and Arbitrum actually launched, people were actively building protocols to replace Luna, others were building perp DEXs, raising funds and rewarding people with life-changing airdrops while also getting crypto folks to use their protocols.
We had the like of JUPITER, and so many other protocols launch amazing products that people could easily use, and even though 2023 was not a bull run year, just a year before the Halving year, a lot of people still found interesting ways to interact with crypto and made money. In 2026 however the market is the way it is simply because of 2025 not experiencing a "December pump".
This basically translates to projects not having enough money from the last cycle, Angel investors not making money from BTC or other token. Seed rounds not gotten from meme pumps and people having urge or drive to bring external money since they didn't make enough from the previous cycle.
Also projects shutting down because they no longer have users testing their apps or protocols and basically no new funds because people are too scared to play with the small liquidity they accumulated in 2025.
With crypto, people do not spend when there is no promise of making more, this is what makes the market scary or boring. Projects aren't building, there aren't attractive narratives and new projects can't get funded because we already have a lot of L1s, L2s and 3, and anyone building anything new at the moment would either need to have a coin that's pumping to get people interested, build a ridiculously good product that people would use without even looking at the crypto aspect.
A product that solves either onboarding problem or a product that uses crypto to provide convenience for real world finance. Without these, any project build now might actually suffer.
However it's not all doom and gloom.
This is the first for the market because of a previous cycle that didn't live up to expectations. Every project out there is experiencing a lot of massive problems of survival and staying afloat, including the types that raised $85M.
In reality we will not continue to be this way because people will eventually begin to take lessons from previous failed projects in order to build better versions.
As for older projects that are currently surviving, they're the real MVPs of the market. Projects like Hive (and a few others that are still standing) I think it'll all get better again.
It might still be the same old pattern, but not as unique as it once was. The market will probably move from changing lives from nothing to rewarding financial and economic participants, for now we just have to build, keeping forking, testing and iterating and preparing our protocols for better market conditions
