🍬 Thoughts on Solana in a Bear Market

GM and welcome to SOL Sweet. Did you remember to add sugar to your coffee? Good. Now sit back, we've got something a little different this week...

Thoughts on Solana in a Bear Market

Solana managed to stay relatively quiet during another chaotic week in crypto.

The network didn’t crash again and our token isn’t worth Terra zero.

Hands up if you breathed a sigh of relief?

Okay, okay, chill. We’re not all supposed to put our hands up!

And while there was Solana news to get to, we thought we’d take the chance to drop our thoughts on this bear market from a Solana perspective.

After all, we’re SOL maxis, right?

You see, I’m relatively new to crypto in a hands-on way.

I’ve followed Bitcoin since 2017, so technically this isn’t my first bear market.

But I wasn’t actively using Bitcoin like I have been with SOL in the past 6-9 months.

Staking, trading NFTs, exploring DeFi has all been fun.

Watching SOL rise and dip and rally had us feeling good.

Until you stop and realize that no matter how many gains you’ve made, we’re still down ~90% from our all time high.

F*CK!

And while everyone else in crypto/web3 land is pointing to previous bear markets, it suddenly occurred to me - we don’t have a previous bear market to compare Solana to…

Double F*CK!!

This means two things:

1. We literally don't know what could happen next

2. We really are that early

This is what Solana's all time price chart looks like:

It's almost a perfect bell curve. Up, up, up. Down, down down.

Compared to Ethereum's all time price chart:

They've had more dips and dives than a dodgeball team.

But because of that, they can look back to look ahead.

And it results in tables that paint a reassuring picture, like this one from our frens at the Milk Road:

The narrative here is that the previous high becomes this time's low.

When you zoom out and look at it like that, it's easier to maintain conviction.

But what do you do if your previous high was zero?

We look elsewhere to paint our version of a reassuring picture.

It's commonly said that bear markets are when the building happens. Well Solana is still building.

Updates continue to roll out to improve the network. Those who are actually using the blockchain are raving:

And a look deeper shows more positive signals. As Mert points out:

These charts show us three positive signals:

1. Users - the number of active wallets hasn't dropped relative to token price

2. Activity - users are still transacting inside the ecosystem with some activity (NFTs) trending upward

3. Developer activity - hasn't slowed down, builders are still building and shipping

Sure, it's easy to point to a few charts and make it look good. But there's more positive signals than just charts.

Last week we looked at Solana's $100M investment fund that's being deployed in South Korea.

Capital is still flowing into the system, allowing more building to take place.

This investment only adds to those good looking charts above.

Of course, this could all be wrong and we could still go to zero. We are that early, remember.

But I don't see an ecosystem that's hanging on for dear life. I see an ecosystem showing real belief in what is being built.

Yes, a massive run up towards the tail end of a historic bull run looks bad when that bull turns into a bear.

No, that doesn't paint a true picture of what is happening inside the Solana ecosystem.

It's true that markets go up and down. This is the first time in Solana's history we've seen the market go down.

So far, we're painting a picture that doesn't look too bad.

And maybe we'll look back on this downturn one day as the point where Solana's foundations were truly laid.

Extra Sweets

Solana trolls Jack Dorsey's web5. Who said you can't have fun in a bear market.

New move-to-earn project Walken will launch next week. Whether it's stepping or walking, we probably won't see the highs of move-to-earn again for a while.

Solana's new gas fees model is nearly ready. And Toly tried to EIL5 - not a bad effort!

Phantom and MetaMask teamed up to fix a potential security bug that could've affected all browser wallets. Like Batman and Robin.

Okay, that was a little different. What did you think?

👍 Loved it

👎 Stick to the news, bro!

And please take 10 seconds to forward this to a friend who should be keeping up with Solana. It's as easy as one, two, three, and it helps us like a, b, c. Thanks!

- Toby (@TenderKiwi)