Unlike crypto’s early believers, mass adoption means most investors now view crypto as just another asset class and treat it in much the same way as the rest of their portfolio. That makes crypto prices more correlated to everything else, like technology stocks.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t make most crypto bets any less complex to understand. Though most of the financial world is taking a beating in 2022, the recent crypto market crash was amplified by its experimental and speculative nature, wiping out small-town traders who stuck their life savings in untested projects like Terra with little recourse. And the sector’s hype machine is blaring louder than ever, utilizing tools like Twitter and Reddit that have been strengthened by new generations of crypto acolytes. Exchanges have also done their part, with FTX, Binance and Crypto.com all spending on marketing and high-profile sponsorships.
Sina Meier, managing director at crypto fund manager 21Shares AG, said that extreme level of risk demonstrates exactly why crypto isn’t for everyone. “Some people should definitely stay away,” she said during a panel discussion earlier this month at Bloomberg’s Future of Finance conference in Zurich. Many retail investors “are lost, they just follow what they read in the newspapers. That’s a mistake.”
Before the previous crypto winter, many startups had used initial coin offerings, or ICOs, to raise capital by issuing their own tokens to investors. They suffered when coin prices came crashing down because they had kept most of their value in that same pool of assets, plus Ether, and it worsened when regulators started to crack down on ICOs as akin to offering unregistered securities to investors.
This time around, the funding landscape is vastly different. Many startups born out of the last freeze, such as nonfungible-token and gaming platform Dapper Labs, have sought out venture capital funding as a more traditional route to raising cash. Behemoths like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital collectively plugged almost $43 billion into the sector since late 2020 when the last bull market began, according to data from PitchBook.
This means that instead of relying on crypto wealth, some of its biggest players actually have vast reserves of hard currency stored to get them through the blizzard as they work on growing new blockchains or building decentralized media platforms. On the other hand, the recent end to the bull market means they’ve been spending that cash much faster than it’s been coming in.
This month Coinbase Global Inc., Crypto.com, Gemini Trust and BlockFi Inc. are among the crypto companies to have announced swaths of layoffs, citing the general macroeconomic downturn for derailing their previously ever-expanding plans. Coinbase, which had hired about 1,200 people this year alone, is now laying off about as many employees in an 18% cut to its workforce.
But thanks to the heights crypto reached in the last boom, there’s still a great amount of earmarked funding sloshing around Silicon Valley’s coffers compared to previous seasons. Andreessen alum Katie Haun debuted her $1.5 billion crypto fund in March, while Coinbase co-founder Matt Huang launched a $2.5 billion vehicle in November. And while VCs might be more careful now about where they put their cash, it’s still got to be spent somewhere.
“None of these companies become mature for many years,” said Alston Zecha, partner at Eight Roads. “We’ve been spoiled over the last couple of years of seeing businesses get these amazing up-rounds after six or nine months. As the tide goes out, there’s going to be a lot of people who are found to be naked.”
--With assistance from Vildana Hajric.