If you follow the mainstream media for crypto advice, which is not an activity that we would typically recommend, Bitcoin is in a bear market.
Never mind that it’s up almost 200% in the last three months, according to them, a quick 25% drawdown means it’s all over. In other other news, Polkadot is climbing the crypto rankings, taking the rest of the alt coins down a peg. Larimer is out of EOS, Hoskinson is big into Cardano and a Bitcoin milestone turned twelve!
You’ve got to see it to believe it. According to a CNN, quote, “Bitcoin plunges more than 20% in three days. It's now in a bear market.” This headline deserves a gold medal. The amount of mental gymnastics you’d have to go through in order to believe that Bitcoin is in a bear market is staggering. We’re exactly halfway through the month of January and at the time that this article was written, on January 12th, Bitcoin was still up 15% for the year.
For those who aren’t steeped in market wisdom, most investors expect to earn 8% per year on their investments. That’s sort of the baseline assumption for the kind of returns you can expect in the stock market. So in fifteen days, even after a 20% drawdown, Bitcoin still produced double the returns that stock market investors expect to get in 365 days.
From peak to trough, from $41,000 to just over $31,000, what we saw was only a 27% decline. More importantly, that dip got bought so fast that only a lucky few were able to catch it. Just 3 measly days after the crash started and Bitcoin is already back up to $40,000. We’re just one 8% move away from breaking through $42,000 and setting all time highs, again. In a way it’s almost frustrating because there are so few opportunities to buy the dip. That being said, if you’re like us and you just lived through the 2018 bear market, you’re probably pretty happy to see Bitcoin keep going up so fast. Onward and upward, orange coin, and let’s never have to think about $10,000 Bitcoin again.
Even by crypto standards Polkadot has been on a nice little rip. In the last 24 hours the coin has gone up nearly 20%. 
But to really appreciate what’s going on you have to take a step back to the monthly charts. In the last 90 days the Polkadot token has gone up 282%, a whopping gain that even makes Bitcoin’s meteoric rise look a little bit sluggish.
The rankings are changing all the time of course, but as of today Polkadot is now the number 5 crypto by market cap.
Dan Larimer is a crypto OG who has started multiple technology companies steem and bitshares but most famously, Larimer helped to create the popular smart contract platform EOS. Larimer has been working on the EOS blockchain since the spring of 2017 but that’s all set to change as he’s announced his retirement from the project.
It’s an interesting move considering that EOS, with its $4 billion ICO, is one of the most well funded crypto projects in the world, if not the most well funded project. Now there may be no surprise here if we pull back and look at his past MO so something more than money must be driving Lairimer as he explores other options. One factor could be the fact that despite its massive budget, EOS has failed to build out a big community similar to Ethereum’s. Lairimer has stated that he’s leaving EOS to work on, quote, “personal projects.” It’ll be interesting to see what he comes up with since Lairimer’s projects have a way of turning out to be pretty big deals before it’s all said and done.
One person who’s not jumping ship is Charles Hoskinson, the co-founder of Cardano. In fact Charles must be pretty pleased with what’s going on right now as staking on the Cardano network has started to really take off. As of January 15th, just under 70% of all Cardano ADA has been staked. That’s 21.75 billion ADA tokens, worth about $7 billion at today’s prices.
This is really good news for Cardano, as it proves that their decentralized staking model is offering enough incentives to get people staking. All of this staking does lead to an interesting question about liquidity though. Will it be bad for network health if 70% of all ADA coins are locked up, leaving just a 30% liquid supply on the market? Only time will tell. For now though we’re happy for the Cardano team as years of hard work are finally paying off.
Get a cake and bust out the candles for Bitcoin’s birthday. Twelve years ago this week the first Bitcoin transaction took place, when Satoshi Nakamoto sent 10 BTC to the programmer Hal Finney. A historic occasion, the first time in history that money was sent over the internet using distributed ledger technology. No banks, no centralized databases, no payments company. Just a couple of laptops and two very intelligent individuals. Happy birthday, Bitcoin!
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