A bear market is a term often used to describe the current markets. Yahoo Finance has called July 2022 an early-stage bull market, but there are not many institutions that share this retail optimism.
Bear market is defined as a period of time when stock prices are falling and investors are pessimistic about the future direction of the market.
One of the “hindsight is 20/20” indicators of an approaching crypto bear is when major cryptos reach their peak and begin to fall. But there is always much discussion whether the peak was final or whether it was just a reaccumulation range.
There are other factors, though - these include an increase in margin levels, decrease of interest in apps, games or exchanges and deterioration in economic fundamentals.
The latter influences crypto as well. Speculative institutional traders need to have easy access to money to speculate and, apparently, entrepreneurs need to have access to cheap funding to pay for marketing.
Enter creative marketing practices
That’s what everyone got used to doing, at least. The amount of projects started without venture capital is small and pretty much limited to niches that are off-putting to startup investors.
If you are in crypto and ever use any platform that is even vaguely centralised, you should monitor who is making it through the thin times well. In my opinion, crypto platforms that are able to pull off creative marketing practices will be the safest ones you can deal with for this year and beyond.
There are some classic choices when it comes to staying power.
Bitfinex has just announced they are making Santiment metrics available for free to all traders.
Santiment is a tokenized crypto project that has been around for years. They started off by collecting sentiment data, but the services have expanded since. Santiment is now one of the very few platforms that offers some data on NFT trading.
If you don’t want to pay 300 USD a month for Nansen and are just happy with the basics, you can now get a free 30 day trial of Santiment by getting an account at Bitfinex. See if the data is useful and after the trial runs out, Sanbase monthly fee is only 44 USD.
Make a no-KYC account at Bitfinex and then click the ‘S’ icon in the price box to access Santiment
Trading NFTs can be a profitable niche right now, if you have the guts for that illiquid market and its wash trading setups. Either way, trading NFTs will be harder to regulate than most of what’s called DeFi right now. Whether you care for the art at all or not, it’s important to at least consider its presence.
NFT airdrops are a big deal right now, probably because they are so cheap to set up. The tripwire of the week are NFTs needed as an entrance ticket to Play2Earn projects or as a whitelist token for future airdrops.
And then there are the CEX platforms that gamify everything, such as Phemex.
Every week they run a quiz that forces you to look up and learn information about a new memecoin or a staking coin that is just being launched. If you get all five questions right, you get the airdrop. These quizzes are pretty popular - we post them every Wednesday on Medium and people click them like mad. I’m sure things are looking up for Phemex.
Final words
To wrap it up, there are three primary characteristics of a bear market: price depreciation, selling and widespread pessimism.
Bear markets also tend to coincide with economic cycles, with the sharpest downturns typically occurring midway through the cycle - not at the beginning and not at the end.