Joe Lubin, CEO of crypto software giant ConsenSys and co-founder of Ethereum, highlighted that the price action immediately after the Merge, was a possibly inevitable ‘sell the news’ kind of activity.
The Merge was flawless but Ether has since been down a brutal 22%. Lubin attributes the price to the macro economy. He explained that the economy is broken and it’s likely to remain broken for a while. Lubin said the crypto market remains the tail that is being wagged by a very sick dog. Here, the sick dog is the global macro situation. Amid the macroeconomic madness, Lubin said Ethereum’s ecosystem and the overall company are doing quite well.
But this seems to be the explanation of almost every executive in the crypto space. It should be noted that crypto markets remain affected by the same economic headwinds in the United States, that is inflation and Federal interest rates, and globally due to the ongoing war in Ukraine and the hangover of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s weighing heavily on stocks, bonds, and other more established investment vehicles.
Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana founder, highlighted the same factors. He believes the crypto market will see another year of the bear market. Yakovenko said there is probably 12 to 18 months more of this brutal, Fed rates going up. But there will be an end to it. He outlined the last bear market wherein a lot of teams built and focused on product-market fit, and tried to build amazing products – with a lot of successes, in a very dramatic way.
FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried also shared similar views. At the SALT conference in New York last month, he said everything is down this year because dollars are up.
