Editor's Note: On February 6th, Bitcoin fell to a low of $60,000, plummeting 15.48% in a single day, marking its largest single-day drop since the FTX collapse. At the same time, the Crypto Fear & Greed Index dropped to 9, indicating a state of 'Extreme Fear' in the market, hitting a new low since the 2022 bear market.
However, as pessimism spreads, many veteran Builders and thought leaders in the crypto world are voicing a different perspective. This 'Crypto Faith Topping-Up List' compiles their thoughts and perseverance amidst the storm. Perhaps it can offer you a sliver of solace and direction to move forward during this market winter.
Michael Saylor:
If you want to give me a birthday present, buy yourself some Bitcoin!
Base Founder:
13 years have passed, and I'm not going anywhere.
There's still so much to build.
Solana Foundation President LilyLiu:
Blockchain was, is, and always will be financial technology. Their core purpose is financialization.
This is also why, when designing a chain, protecting the unity of liquidity is more important than almost anything else.
I'm glad the misguided focus on things like 'chain games' is finally over.
More broadly, the 'read write own' / 'Web3 narrative' is essentially too skeuomorphic and, to be honest, a bit intellectually lazy. New technology is never as simple as 'put something on-chain, and voilà—everything changes'; you must truly create new markets.
The old narrative was more of a fig leaf, used to justify VCs pouring money into various unnecessary infrastructures, hoping to create a private asset that could become 'magic internet money.'
The more projects try to attract prices through narrative packaging and take a share of the liquidity from the 'wild west' of the internet, the harder the 'narrative justification machine' has to work, shaping everything into the 'great third wave of applications'—'everything you do today can now earn you money.'
The reality is, the opportunities are indeed huge, far beyond what even our most creative minds can imagine, but not in the way they've been described over the past few years.
The blockchain journey has always been about finance: providing open financial infrastructure for anyone and everyone on the internet.
This enables capital formation and internet innovation to happen anywhere in the world, allowing the resulting innovation and progress to truly take root. Open finance brings greater economic freedom, and economic freedom brings individual sovereignty and autonomy.
Balaji:
I have never been more bullish on cryptocurrency than I am now.
Because the 'rules-based order' is collapsing, and the 'code-based order' is rising. So short-term prices simply don't matter.
As the international legal system disintegrates, we need not only on-chain money but also on-chain companies. As the post-war order unravels, we similarly need a 'post-internet order.' Nations will fail, and networks will replace them.
We need internet capitalism, we need internet democracy, we need internet privacy.
So we need cryptocurrency.
Helius Founder:
I have never been more confident about the future of cryptocurrency than I am now.
Let the tourists bleed out and leave.
We need to increase the signal-to-noise ratio in this space, and this will achieve that goal.
Trillion
Linda Xie:
I know the current market environment is tough. I hope these experiences can be helpful to some. For me, the personal and professional low point was in January 2018, after launching a crypto liquidity fund, when the market fell 90% that year. Our fund experienced a maximum drawdown of a humiliating 75%, meaning the fund needed to quadruple just to break even.
At the time, many investors chose to trust us (this was after about 1,000 fundraising meetings), some of whom I deeply respected, and I felt I had let them down; some investors even yelled at me over the phone. I was extremely worried about what I had gotten everyone into, including employees. I had also invested almost all of my personal savings.
But we stuck to the direction we truly believed in, and it eventually paid off years later (currently delivering about 4x DPI for investors). Hold onto assets you genuinely believe in fundamentally, and don't make any extreme decisions driven by emotion.
Shenyu:
1btc = 1btc
