I have officially experienced two bear markets in my crypto life, and this is the toughest, I thought I had seen a worse bear market from my experience with 2018 Bear Market, but this one is tough and way different. This is my opinion on why this crypto bear market is way different from 2018 bear market. This 2022 bear market has a lot of changes obviously attached to it, the last bear market, there was devaluation in tokens and coins but this one has devaluation in NFTs too. Just as the bear market is affecting the tokens and coins, NFTs are also affected, I know you will be like, but NFTs are tokens too. Yeah they are, but they are mainstream digital arts embedded in a blockchain that are part of the crypto community now, in 2018 they existed but were not mainstream or relèvent.
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Today we are seeing a lot of companies adopt it and a lot of people use it as a means of proof of attendance or participation in projects. For instance, the Aptos airdrop, where people minted the Martian NFT and got eligible for the airdrop. Aside that, NFTs are down in value as the crypto market is dipping, not just down in dollar value but down in token value. If your NFT was your worth 20 SOL in the bull market it’s possible it’s worth 5 SOL now, in 2018 it wasn’t like this. People were only worried about their coins and tokens, now you have to worry about your pixelated ducks and donkey pictures tou bought for over a million dollars a year ago that is wort $100k now.
Another reason is, in 2018, minor exchanges were failing, I don’t think they were considered much of a big deal because no one knew them, but today, big time exchanges and crypto companies people trusted with their life savings are failing. FTX failure still feels like a dream to me, because in 2018 people lost their money because they invested in crypto Ponzi schemes, like bitconnect and the likes. But 2022 people didn’t invest in crypto Ponzi scheme but only deposited their money in exchanges and companies which were expected to have extremely low risk and low reward and still lost their money. People were not even trying to get greedy, they were just looking for a reliable place to store their crypto. This has created more hardware wallet awareness and more adoption. Don’t be surprised when more people will be using more hardware wallets in the future.