Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin says crypto ‘welcomes' another winter
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain, says the digital-asset universe may actually benefit from the current retreat in coin prices that’s cast a chill on investors and is being referred to as another crypto winter.
“The people who are deep into crypto, and especially building things, a lot of them welcome a bear market,” Buterin said during an interview with Bloomberg. “They welcome the bear market because when there are these long periods of prices moving up by huge amounts like it does -- it does obviously make a lot of people happy -- but it does also tend to invite a lot of very short-term speculative attention.”
Cryptocurrency prices have tumbled since reaching record highs in early November as investors and speculators anticipate a reduction of the massive amounts of stimulus added to economies and global markets in the wake of the Covid pandemic. The Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto Index is down about 45% from its all-time high. Ether, the native currency of the world’s most widely used blockchain, has slumped around 40% during the same period.
Since the last “crypto winter” in 2018, the sector has boomed. The price tracking website CoinGecko lists a staggering 12,588 tokens. The large amount of money invested during the latest crypto bull run may have created many overnight millionaires or billionaires stories, but one’s gains in crypto is often also another’s losses and pain. Market manipulation schemes such as those referred to as pumps and dumps were often found in crypto applications run by people who were only in crypto for the short-term profits.
“The winters are the time when a lot of those applications fall away and you can see which projects are actually long-term sustainable, like both in their
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