Take a deep breath, it’s all going to be okay.
Crypto’s total market cap has drawn down over $500 billion since its peak on March 12th at $2.8 trillion. Taking a look at the timeline, however, you’d think its Black Thursday all over again. In reality, we’re only down 17% overall marketcap while Bitcoin is barely 3% from it’s previous all time highs!
But let’s assume people are screaming out of pain and not for attention. Where’s the turmoil in the market? Let’s look below at a few sub-sectors.
Bitcoin miners
While miner’s revenues are Bitcoin denominated, the Bitcoin issuance just got sliced in half. Yes, there was a magnificent pump in fees due to the Runes protocol launch at the halving but that was short-lived. Now, miners are experiencing all time low profitabilities as hashprice ranges in the low $50/Ph/d. Nevertheless, this is familiar territory to Bitcoin miners—many have been calling for a pause in the unrelenting ascent of hashrate.
Memecoins
One of the few true mania events across crypto in years has lost some steam, with about $20 billion wiped off the score board since March. These dog and cat coins are arguably the retail front lines–hence shameless VCs trying to build funds around them–so any price decline will be heard the loudest. But let’s be honest: is it really that bad that memecoins are coming down? In retrospect, it was inevitable.
Ordinals & NFTs
Ordinals are dead…. again. The Ordinals ecosystem is still a little difficult to measure, but we can see that iconic 10k collections such as Bitcoin Puppets & Nodemonkes have each pulled back about $180 million in market cap each. The broader ecosystem hasn’t fared well either—marketplace volumes for Inscriptions are the lowest since last October and new user inflow appears to be stalling as Asia has largely faded Runes. Historically speaking though, calling the top on Ordinals hasn’t been a successful strategy.
Other bearish news
ETF inflows become ETF outflows, Ethereum waffles on it’s roadmap forwards, and Bitcoin privacy tooling has been under attack. Even Nikki Glaser made fun of Tom Brady on national television for his involvement in “fake money.” There’s something for everyone to be bearish about heading into the summer!
As a personal observation, I do see growth everywhere. As I typed this in the airport I’ve heard more than one person talk about “crypto” in a generally positive light. Subjectively, I no longer feel like I have to justify working in a “real” industry. I bet that you, reader, can identify with this at least somewhat.
