OlivetreesReal

How the Bull Market Trained an Entire Generation to Lose 🤔
The real scam of the last crypto cycle wasn’t a token, it was the promise that wealth could be effortless.

The recent crypto boom didn’t just attract investors, it shaped a mindset. From 2020 to 2021, the crypto market soared from around $200 billion to over $3 trillion. Bitcoin itself surged past $60,000 at its peak, cementing its role as the flagship of the bull run. Even today, in February 2026, Bitcoin trades around $69,767 with a market cap of approximately $1.39 trillion ,proof that despite volatility, $BTC remains the dominant crypto asset. Coins surged 10x, 50x, even 100x in weeks. Social media was flooded with success stories, screenshots of profits, and “how I got rich” content.
For many newcomers, this was their first exposure to financial markets, and the lessons were dangerously skewed.
Instead of learning patience, research, and strategy, participants were taught:
Wealth comes to the bold, the lucky, and the loud.
🔴A MARKET THAT FELT LIKE A CHEAT CODE
According to Chainalysis (2022), over 70% of retail investors jumped into crypto during the bull run, meaning the majority had never experienced a full market cycle.
Instead of learning how markets ebb and flow, they experienced a fantasy version where:
Every coin seemed to rise endlessly
Risk was invisible
Fundamentals were optional
Losses felt impossible
This is a textbook case of recency bias: assuming that recent gains will continue indefinitely. In crypto, this became a cultural norm rather than an exception.

THE HIDDEN COST OF “EASY MONEY”
Fast gains aren’t neutral, they rewire behavior:
Luck masquerades as skill: Small wins inflate confidence.
Risk management fades: Why hedge when everything seems to moon?
Time horizons shrink: Long-term planning becomes irrelevant.
Easy money builds fragile psychology.
The first real loss doesn’t teach lessons. It shatters expectations.

FOMO: MORE THAN FEAR, A CHEMICAL REACTION
Social media amplified this effect. TikTok influencers, Twitter threads promising 100x gains, and Discord hype trains transformed investing into a dopamine fueled spectacle.
Most new participants weren’t investing because they understood the assets.
They invested because they didn’t want to miss out.
They bought stories, not tokens.
Communities, not fundamentals.
Hype, not long-term value.
When the Bubble Bursts
When prices finally collapsed, the damage went beyond wallets:
Ego was bruised
Confidence eroded
Identity tied to green charts was shaken
Future dreams were questioned
Many people didn’t just hold crypto ,they defined themselves by it.
Bear markets don’t just shrink portfolios.
They challenge narratives.
The Reset That Matters
The crash isn’t about the price of coins.
It’s about expectations.
The era that promised: “Wealth is easy. Just buy and hold.” …IS OVER.
The survivors will be those who embrace:
Deep understanding over hype
Patience over impulse and
Discipline over shortcuts

When the illusion of easy money fades, what remains is true skill ,the foundation for building real wealth in the next cycle.
PART1 OF THE GREAT CRYPTO RESET IS LIVE.
THIS ISN’T JUST A POST ,IT’S A WAKE-UP CALL.
READ IT. SHARE IT. REFLECT ON IT.
COMING SOON: PART 2 ,FROM ILLUSION TO DISCIPLINE
HOW TO BUILD RESILIENCE, STRATEGY, AND TRUE WEALTH IN VOLATILE MARKETS.
#MarketRebound #CryptoPatience

Short answer: yes. But…

What happened
This week wasn’t driven by a single event or headline. It was the result of several pressures lining up and then releasing at the same time.

Macro conditions were already fragile.

• Liquidity is still being drained.
• Rate expectations haven’t eased.
• Tech stocks started to soften again,

and crypto continues to react to that environment faster and more violently than most other assets. That part isn’t controversial. It’s been the backdrop for months.

What changed this week was the structure.

Bitcoin didn’t drift lower. It moved quickly, through levels that usually slow price down. That kind of move doesn’t come from people calmly changing their minds. It usually comes from positions being closed because they have to be.

The clearest signal showed up in IBIT. This was the highest IBIT options volume day ever recorded, almost double the previous peak. That tells you institutions weren’t sitting on their hands. They were actively trading downside and protection at size.

Heavy volume like that doesn’t mean panic, and it doesn’t mean one sided selling. It means large players were willing to transact at lower prices, immediately.

At the same time;

• leverage came out of the system fast.
• Funding rates turned deeply negative.
• Long positions were liquidated in a short window.

That’s the signature of forced selling. It’s not about conviction. It’s all about margin.

There’s a plausible explanation for why this unwind looked the way it did. A meaningful share of IBIT exposure sits inside single-asset funds, many of them outside the US, particularly in Asia. These structures isolate margin by design. They don’t cross-collateralize with other strategies. When something breaks inside them, the response isn’t gradual. Positions get cut.

The timing was important. This happened while other leveraged trades were already under stress.

• Japan’s carry trade has been unwinding.
• Silver collapsed sharply.
• China tightened its stance around stablecoins and tokenization.
• Liquidity across several markets thinned at once.

When that happens, the most liquid venues tend to absorb the shock first.
Crypto did exactly that.

By the end of the week, sentiment reflected the damage. Fear readings dropped to levels usually associated with crisis periods, not routine corrections.

That doesn’t tell you what comes next. It only tells you that a lot of people stopped feeling comfortable very quickly.

That’s the sequence of events.

Where we are?

After a forced unwind, markets behave differently.

• Leverage is lighter now.
• Funding has stabilized after turning sharply negative.
• Most of the easy liquidations have already happened.

That doesn’t mean the market is “safe.” It means fewer participants are being pushed out mechanically.

Several institutional desks described this move as momentum driven liquidation rather than a reassessment of long term fundamentals. That distinction important, because it changes how capital responds after the fact. Selling driven by margin tends to end when margin is gone.

ETF behavior fits that picture. Volume stayed elevated even as price fell. That’s not disengagement. That’s basic repositioning. Capital didn’t leave. It adjusted.

Ethereum is the quiet counterpoint. Price remains weak, but usage doesn’t show stress.

• Monthly active addresses just reached a new high.
• The validator entry queue is the largest it’s ever been.
• For every one ETH trying to exit staking, well over a hundred are waiting to enter.

That kind of imbalance doesn’t show up in price immediately, but it says something about how long term holders are behaving.

Institutional activity around Ethereum hasn’t slowed either. BlackRock, Fidelity, JPMorgan are still building and expanding real products. That work isn’t speculative and it isn’t sensitive to short term price moves.

Regulatory progress continues in the background. It’s slow and procedural, but the tone is materially different from previous cycles. Less adversarial, more technical. That doesn’t create rallies yes, but it does change the environment over time.

Bitcoin itself is sitting near long-observed historical reference levels that tend to appear after forced selling phases. These areas have never felt obvious in real time. They didn’t in past cycles either. They felt uncertain, often frustrating, and usually earlier than most people were comfortable with.

So…

Is bitcoin dead?

Long answer: It’s officially in the dead zone now (look at the rainbow chart).

Remember, long term holders start selling when everybody screams that it will go to the moon, right?

So, when do they start buying?

• • • • • •

Price could still move lower. It could also spend time going nowhere. Markets often do that after stress events.

What has changed is the quality of the selling. It looks less deliberate and more exhausted.

• Fear is high (all time record “5” at Feb 6. It’s crazy).
• Confidence is thin.
• Narratives are scattered.

That’s not a signal. It’s just context.

And context is usually the only useful thing when certainty disappears…

That was the week.
Talk again soon…

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Before the world took digital assets seriously, and long before crypto became a global market, a small group of engineers questioned a fundamental flaw in money itself.
Why should value move slower than information?
In 2012, that question gave birth to $XRP
From its inception, XRP was built with a different philosophy. There would be no mining, no race for block rewards, no unnecessary delays. Instead, all 100 billion units were created at launch (although not all were in circulation) and secured on the XRP Ledger, a network engineered for speed, efficiency, and reliability. Transactions settled in seconds, costs were negligible, and the system worked quietly in the background, precisely as financial infrastructure should.
Traditional finance took notice.
While much of crypto defined itself in opposition to banks, XRP moved toward them. Ripple, the company developing solutions around the ledger, proposed a practical use case: a neutral digital asset that could bridge currencies and eliminate friction in cross-border payments. Partnerships followed, not loudly, but steadily, as institutions tested a future where money moved without delay.
Then came the reckoning.
The speculative excesses of 2017 pushed XRP into the global spotlight. Prices surged, expectations inflated, and scrutiny intensified. Questions about structure and control grew louder. In December 2020, those questions crystallized into action when the U.S. SEC filed a lawsuit against Ripple, alleging $XRP was sold as an unregistered security.
The impact was immediate. U.S. exchanges suspended trading. Liquidity dried up. Confidence faltered. Many assumed the experiment had reached its end.
It had not.
As the legal battle unfolded, XRP continued operating beyond U.S. borders. Payment corridors remained active. Developers kept building. The ledger processed transactions without interruption, indifferent to headlines and sentiment. What survived was not hype, but infrastructure.
In 2023, the narrative shifted.
A federal court ruled that XRP itself was not a security when sold on public exchanges. The decision did not end regulatory debate, but it restored clarity where uncertainty had dominated. Exchanges relisted XRP. Market confidence stabilized. More importantly, the ruling reshaped how the industry understood the line between digital assets and securities law.
Today, XRP exists as a tested system rather than a theoretical one. It plays a role in cross-border payments, tokenization initiatives, and digital currency infrastructure for institutions and governments. Debate around its design persists, but so does its relevance.
XRP’s history is not defined by sudden breakthroughs or perfect conditions.
It is defined by persistence.
By operating through skepticism.
By remaining functional when the market moved on.
And in markets shaped by cycles and narratives, that kind of survival is rarely accidental.
#MarketRebound #CPIWatch