cryptowinter

The cryptocurrency market, previously rocked by internal disasters such as the collapse of exchanges and investment bubbles, followed by the collapse of algorithmic stablecoins, is undergoing a fundamentally different type of correction in 2026.
Over the 17 years of its existence, Bitcoin has experienced several large-scale bear markets, resulting not only in price corrections but also in fundamental changes across the entire industry.
The nature of these shocks has evolved along with the market. Unlike earlier crises, today's crises no longer call the technology itself into question, but rather confirm its maturity, integrating Bitcoin ever more deeply into the global financial system.
The fall in the price of Bitcoin since the end of 2025 differs from previous ones in that there is no internal crisis in the crypto market. Experts increasingly cite the monetary policy of the US Federal Reserve and geopolitical tensions in the world as factors influencing the market.
Since 2014, Bitcoin has experienced several major crises. The most dramatic price crashes have usually coincided with specific shocks, ranging from the collapse of major exchanges and market bubbles to systemic failures in the industry and global macroeconomic shocks.
The 2014 crisis: Mt. Gox bankruptcy
In 2014, the crypto industry experienced its first systemic shock with the bankruptcy of Mt.Gox, the largest cryptocurrency exchange at the time. The platform lost 850,000 bitcoins as a result of a hack (more than $59 billion at the exchange rate at the beginning of February 2026). This undermined confidence not so much in blockchain technology as in the immature infrastructure surrounding it.
The price of bitcoin plummeted from around $1,160 to $150, losing more than 85%, and the bearish trend in the market lasted for about 14 months. This crisis forced the market to rethink the creation and development of crypto platforms, replacing amateur services and approaches with the first professional solutions for storage and trading. Exchanges began to implement stricter security procedures. Recovery took years, but it helped build a more solid foundation for future growth.
The first payments to affected exchange customers began only at the end of 2023. According to Arkham, as of February 8, there were 34,500 bitcoins worth nearly $2.5 billion remaining in the group of wallets controlled by Mt. Gox administrators.
The 2018 crisis: The ICO bubble
The bursting of the speculative bubble surrounding initial coin offerings (ICOs – similar to IPOs, but raising capital through the issuance of tokens) in 2018 became another systemic crisis. In 2017, projects raised millions of dollars through the issuance of tokens, often with nothing but an idea. At its peak in 2017, the price of Bitcoin reached a cycle high of $20,000, after which prices fell for about 12 months, with the cycle low reaching $3,100 and losses reaching 85%.
The main blow fell on altcoins (cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin), many of which depreciated by up to 99%. Most crypto projects at that time were unable to survive this period.
The result of the cycle was the necessary cleansing of the market of outright fraudsters who attracted millions in investments. The focus in the industry shifted from speculation to the development of working products. It was during the ICO bubble that the next big narrative emerged — decentralized finance (DeFi), which determined the growth of the next cycle.
Many leaders of the modern DeFi segment were launched at this time. For example, today's largest decentralized exchange, Uniswap, or the largest lending protocol, Aave, formerly known as ETHLend.
The 2022 crisis: The collapse of LUNA and FTX
In 2022, the crypto market experienced two major crises. In the spring of 2022, the market was shaken by the collapse of the algorithmic stablecoin UST and the associated Terra (LUNA) token. And in the fall, one of the largest crypto exchanges at the time, FTX, collapsed.
The collapse of the Terra ecosystem and its algorithmic stablecoin UST in May 2022 triggered a sharp decline in prices across the entire market. Over the course of about three months, the capitalization of the crypto market fell by hundreds of billions of dollars.
The peak price of Bitcoin in this cycle occurred in November 2021, long before the collapse of LUNA, at a level above $69,000. The cycle's low occurred approximately 12 months later, at a level of about $15,500, and was recorded in November 2022, at the time of the collapse of the FTX exchange.
That bear market had catastrophic consequences not only for crypto asset prices, but also for many organizations due to losses on LUNA and UST, with Arrows Capital, Celsius Network, Voyager Digital, and BlockFi going bankrupt. This collapse severely undermined confidence in algorithmic stablecoins and DeFi mechanisms offering unsustainably high returns of around 20% per annum.
The subsequent collapse of FTX led to an additional massive outflow of capital and increased skepticism among retail investors in 2022–2023. Unlike Mt.Gox, which was hacked from the outside, FTX collapsed due to internal abuses, with management using customer funds for their own needs and risky investments.
This resulted in global requirements for transparency, auditing, and proof of reserves. The crisis also accelerated regulatory pressure around the world, for example, the development of global rules for cryptocurrencies in Europe began, and dozens of lawsuits were filed by US regulators against crypto companies.
The 2026 Crisis: Trump and Macroeconomics
The current correction in 2026 is fundamentally different from previous ones and has not yet been accompanied by a systemic internal crisis. At the beginning of February, the peak of this cycle for Bitcoin was formed at $126,200 in October 2025. Since then, the price has fallen by more than 50%, dropping to $60,000 at one point.
Many experts believe that the current cycle is determined by external macroeconomic factors and marks not a cyclical decline, but a fundamental structural transformation of the entire market. For example, analysts at major market maker Wintermute have repeatedly pointed to institutional liquidity flows as the driving force behind Bitcoin's price movements in their reports.
Capital managers such as Grayscale and Bitwise have taken a similar position. Their position is based on the fact that this cycle has not seen the classic parabolic price growth that usually signals market overheating and precedes a deep correction. It is also noted that Bitcoin's movement is now driven by demand from institutional investors, rather than retail investors as before, and by a growing correlation with macroeconomic events.
#cryptowinter

Why Crypto OGs Keep Building When Prices Collapse
On February 6, Bitcoin briefly touched $60,000, plunging more than 15% in a single day—the sharpest fall since the FTX collapse. The Crypto Fear & Greed Index crashed to 9, officially entering extreme fear, a level last seen during the depths of the 2022 bear market.
For most participants, this kind of move signals panic, exit, and disbelief.
For crypto veterans, it signals something else entirely: clarity.
Across Bitcoin, Solana, infrastructure, and long-term capital allocators, a familiar pattern is emerging. While price collapses dominate headlines, builders are quietly making what can only be described as “faith deposits.”
Not blind optimism—but conviction forged through multiple cycles.
Michael Saylor: Price Is Temporary, Conviction Is Compounding
“If you want to give me a birthday gift, buy yourself some Bitcoin.”
Saylor’s message is deceptively simple. He isn’t talking about timing bottoms or catching rebounds. He’s reinforcing a first-principles belief: Bitcoin is a long-duration monetary asset, not a trade.
In moments of extreme fear, Saylor reframes volatility as a transfer of conviction. Coins don’t disappear during crashes—they change hands. And historically, they move from weak hands to those with longer time horizons.
The subtext is clear:
If your thesis breaks because of price, you never had a thesis—only a position.
Base Founder: Thirteen Years In, Still Building
“13 years have passed, and I’m not going anywhere. There is still a lot to build.”
This is not a market statement. It’s a builder’s statement.
Infrastructure builders operate on timelines measured in decades, not quarters. The Base founder’s message underscores a reality many traders forget: crypto does not reset every cycle—its foundations compound.
Bear markets don’t kill ecosystems.
They filter them.
The builders who remain aren’t chasing narratives; they’re laying rails that markets will eventually rediscover.
Lily Liu (Solana Foundation): Blockchain Was Always About Finance
Lily Liu offers one of the most intellectually honest critiques of crypto’s recent past:
Blockchain’s core purpose is financialization.
Liquidity uniformity matters more than almost anything else.
Her rejection of the “read-write-own” and shallow Web3 narratives cuts to the heart of why so many projects failed: they tried to manufacture value through storytelling instead of markets.
Putting something on-chain does not create value.
Creating liquid, accessible, global financial markets does.
Her framing reframes Solana’s strategy not as hype-driven performance chasing, but as financial infrastructure optimization—where liquidity coherence is the real moat.
This is less romantic than Web3 slogans, but far more durable.
Balaji: From Rules-Based Order to Code-Based Order
“I’ve never been more bullish on cryptocurrency than I am now.”
Balaji’s thesis zooms out beyond price charts and into geopolitics.
His argument is stark:
The international rules-based system is erodingLegal certainty is fragmentingTrust in institutions is declining
In that vacuum, code becomes coordination.
Short-term price action is irrelevant when the long-term trend is the migration of money, identity, governance, and companies onto networks. Not because it’s fashionable—but because they work globally when institutions don’t.
This isn’t crypto maximalism.
It’s systems analysis.
Helius Founder: Let the Noise Leave
“Let the tourists bleed, then leave.”
Harsh? Yes.
Accurate? Also yes.
Every cycle brings opportunists who confuse volatility with innovation. When markets collapse, they exit—taking noise with them.
What remains is signal.
Lower prices reduce distractions, reset incentives, and force builders to ship products people actually need. Historically, the best crypto infrastructure has been built during periods of maximum pessimism.
This isn’t cruelty.
It’s natural selection.
Linda Xie: The Quiet Strength of Surviving a 90% Drawdown
Linda Xie’s reflection is the emotional core of this moment.
A 75% drawdown. Angry investors. Personal capital at risk. Years of uncertainty.
And yet—discipline won.
Her lesson isn’t “HODL blindly.”
It’s hold what you understand deeply.
Conviction without fundamentals is delusion.
Fundamentals without patience are useless.
Her experience exposes the invisible cost of building through bear markets—and why those who survive them often outperform dramatically later.
Shenyu: 1 BTC = 1 BTC
Four words. Zero decoration.
In extreme fear, unit bias disappears. What remains is invariance.
This statement rejects fiat framing entirely. It reminds us that volatility exists because we measure crypto in unstable units, while expecting stability.
Sometimes, wisdom doesn’t expand—it compresses.
The Pattern Beneath the Panic
Across all these voices, a shared truth emerges:
• Price is noisy
• Liquidity is cyclical
• Infrastructure is permanent
• Conviction compounds slower than hype—but lasts longer
Market crashes don’t invalidate crypto.
They stress-test belief.
Winter doesn’t kill ecosystems—it reveals which ones were alive to begin with.
And for those still depositing faith while others withdraw hope, history suggests one thing:
They’re not early.
They’re consistent.
#CryptoWinter #Conviction #bitcoin #CryptoEducation #ArifAlpha

The classic “crypto winter,” previously triggered by internal shocks such as the collapse of FTX, has given way to a structural market split under pressure from external macro factors and regulation.
The current state of the crypto market shows that the industry is undergoing not just another cyclical downturn, but a fundamental structural transformation. As noted by Tiger Research analysts, while previous crises originated within the ecosystem itself, whether it was the Mt. Gox hack in 2014, the collapse of the ICO bubble in 2018, or the bankruptcy of FTX and the collapse of Terra (LUNA) in 2022, today the situation is different.
Experts believe that the current correction is caused by external macroeconomic factors, including the US Federal Reserve's monetary policy and geopolitical tensions around the world. Tiger's conclusion is that the current decline is not a “crypto winter” in the classic sense, but rather a new normal, where traditional patterns of market growth or decline have ceased to work.
The crypto market peaked in early October, when Bitcoin reached a record high of $126,200 and the total capitalization of cryptocurrencies reached $4.28 trillion. But shortly thereafter, the crypto market saw its largest liquidation of trading positions ever - nearly $20 billion in a single day. On October 11, cryptocurrency prices began to fall after US President Donald Trump announced a possible increase in tariffs on Chinese products imported into the US.
By February 5, the price of Bitcoin had plummeted to $70,000, and the market capitalization to $2.4 trillion. The dynamics of the decline in cryptocurrencies differed from the prices of precious metals, which reached record highs in early 2026. The indices of the largest US companies showed dynamics similar to those of precious metals.
Analysts understand the classic “crypto winter” model to mean the onset of an internal shock event (the Mt. Gox hack, the ICO bubble, the collapse of Terra and FTX), which instantly destroyed confidence in the industry and caused market participants to doubt the fundamental value of the technology. This crisis inevitably led to a mass exodus of investors, developers, and entrepreneurs to other areas, which exacerbated the situation.
Market segmentation
Although there are signs of a “crypto winter” speculative bubbles, including US President Donald Trump's memecoin (TRUMP), and shock liquidations amid news of US trade tariffs on China there is no internal crisis. Tiger also noted the development of certain sectors of the crypto economy, such as prediction markets, which, according to analysts, indicates not a collapse of the industry, but its adaptation to a changed external environment.
Experts cited regulation as the key factor that changed cryptocurrencies, splitting the blockchain market into three loosely connected segments:
The regulated zone, which includes bitcoin-based exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and tokenized assets (Real World Assets, RWA). This segment is characterized by stable but slow growth due to regulation.The unregulated zone, which includes memecoins and experimental protocols in the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector, as an area for high-risk speculation and innovation.The shared infrastructure, which includes stablecoins and oracles, providing connectivity between the separate zones.
This division has killed the familiar mechanism of capital flowing “top-down.” As Tiger points out, previously, the growth of the main cryptocurrency ensured the flow of liquidity into altcoins (cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin).
Conditions for growth
Analysts emphasize that capital coming through institutional ETFs now remains in Bitcoin and does not flow into other assets. To start the next bullish rally, we'll need to see a truly massive, useful product pop up in the unregulated zone and a major easing of global monetary policy.
In relation to the impact of global monetary policy, Tiger analysts cited the growth of the crypto market in 2020 against the backdrop of cash injections into the economy during the COVID pandemic (the so-called DeFi Summer). And the growth in 2024, against the backdrop of the launch of the first Bitcoin ETFs in the US, coincided with expectations of lower interest rates. Experts clarified that “no matter how well the crypto industry performs, it cannot control interest rates and liquidity.”
In the future, the unregulated zone will become more speculative, experts believe, due to low barriers to entry and the high speed of events: “Cases where there is a 100-fold increase in one day and a 90% drop the next day are becoming more common.”
“The time when everything grows simultaneously is unlikely to repeat itself due to market segmentation. The regulated zone is growing steadily, while the unregulated zone is either soaring or falling. The next bull market will definitely come, but it will not affect everyone,” the experts concluded.
The altcoin season is unlikely to happen again
By rally, Tiger experts mean the onset of altseason (altcoin season) - a slang term used by crypto traders to describe a market phase when alternative cryptocurrencies simultaneously begin to grow faster than Bitcoin. During such periods, capital flows from BTC to riskier coins that offer higher returns.
In past market cycles, including in 2017 and 2021, such phases were accompanied by rallies lasting several months, when many altcoins showed growth in the tens and even hundreds of times, significantly outperforming Bitcoin in terms of returns.
Other industry experts have made similar conclusions. For example, a report by Wintermute, a major market maker in the crypto market, states that liquidity has become more concentrated and is distributed unevenly.
Now, large volumes are concentrated in a smaller number of assets, which the market maker explained by the emergence of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and companies accumulating cryptocurrency as a reserve asset - these participants direct capital primarily to major tokens. Analysts noted that this has affected altcoins, whose price growth has slowed threefold in 2025 compared to 2024.
Delphi Digital analysts also pointed out that the period of massive altcoin growth (alt season) is coming to an end. They suggest that capital will be concentrated only in a narrow circle of projects with structural demand: tokens receiving inflows through ETFs, protocols with real revenue and token buyback programs (buybacks), as well as applications with a proven business model.
There are other opinions that describe the reasons for the lack of global market growth as a shift in investor focus from speculation to assets with clear use cases and a sustainable economy. This opinion was expressed by experts from the management company Grayscale.
#cryptowinter

This one hits hard.
Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan just revealed that the crypto winter quietly began in January 2025 — but was hidden behind ETF inflows and DAT liquidity 🧠
Translation?
The market looked strong… while structure was already weakening underneath.
His key line:
“We’re closer to the end than the beginning.”
That’s not bearish.
That’s late-cycle survival guidance.
📉 What masked the pain:
• ETF demand propping prices
• DAT flows injecting artificial strength
• Retail chasing headlines
• Smart money rotating silently
Now liquidity is thinning.
Momentum is selective.
Only strong narratives survive.
This isn’t panic territory — this is positioning territory.
⚡ Jungle Wisdom:
Real winters don’t announce themselves… they arrive quietly.
📊 QUICK POLL — WHERE ARE WE NOW?
A) Final shakeout before next bull 🚀
B) Deeper winter ahead ❄️
C) Choppy accumulation zone 🔄
D) Just watching 👀
$OG
$SYN
#CryptoWinter #SmartMoneyMoves #MarketCycles #BitcoinAnalysis #LiquidityWatch

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