Note that the decline of cryptocurrencies has been quite tangible recently. To illustrate, we show how the rates of major coins have changed since November 15, 2021, when the market was approaching its peak and Bitcoin had already reached $69,000.

Changes in cryptocurrency rates since November 15, 2021

As we can see, BTC and ETH crashed in value by more than 70 percent, which means that holders of major cryptocurrencies not only failed to protect their capital from inflation, but also lost a lot of money.

According to analysts at Glassnode, yields for long-term BTC holders on the day before fell to levels not seen since December 2018, the bottom of the last bearish trend. On average, investors are getting rid of their own bitcoins at a 42 per cent loss. Apparently, they fear a further market collapse and are trying to preserve some capital.

Returns for long-term bitcoin holders

Despite this, many professional investors are still interested in digital assets because they see great potential in them.

Who is buying cryptocurrencies

According to Hoeptner, periods of market decline are most often used by market players to innovate and find new uses for digital assets. During periods of rapid growth, many have inflated expectations, which puts both project developers and investors under significant pressure. But in a bearish trend, they have the privilege of working without regard to additional factors or opinions as well as cryptocurrency rates.

The head of BitMex is sure that the next bull run will start mainly because of big investors: right now they are still supporting the market, while amateurs panic at every local collapse of Bitcoin and other coins, and hastily withdraw their funds, fixing losses. Here’s an expert’s perspective on what’s going on.

I think institutions are now preparing the infrastructure to provide services, and ordinary investors will return to the market and push cryptocurrency prices up again.


Note that it's not just a BitMEX spokesperson who is commenting on the prospects of the next bull run. The day before, Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz shared a possible scenario for further market growth. He believes that this time the industry will attract first and foremost by its usefulness rather than by its hype.


BitMEX CEO Alexander Hoeptner

Not only Bitcoin, but also Etherium ETH could be in the focus of the “whales”. It’s all about its recent move to the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm, which has reduced the network’s power consumption by more than 99 percent. This brings the coin into full compliance with ESG guidelines, which are taken into account in the investment choices of many institutions.

In addition, the volume of new ethers issued has been reduced by at least 86 per cent. Consequently, the crypto-asset itself has become rarer, which usually creates a positive impression with investors.

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According to Cointelegraph sources, the transition of the Ethereum blockchain itself to the PoS algorithm has gone even better than many developers expected. Starkware co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson told the news outlet in an interview. According to him, the transition was seamless, i.e. everything happened the way it was supposed to. Here’s his rejoinder to that.

The most important thing is that everything was executed flawlessly. Everything that was supposed to happen happened. And nothing that people were worried about interfered with the project. And that’s terrific news.

Etherium’s path to PoS

Ben-Sasson also highlighted the importance of the upgrade to the ecology – or rather, the new reputation of Etherium as a major cryptocurrency that consumes almost no resources on a global scale. In addition to large investors, this point is also a plus in dealing with financial regulators around the world.

According to Ben-Sasson, the merger makes Eth a better base for new decentralised projects and a friendlier platform for second-tier solutions. The executive stressed that this is an important development for Starkware’s products as they will then be able to offer scalability, compression computing and other improvements.

So far, though, scaling on the Etherium network has not taken place. As a reminder, the increase in blockchain throughput will come after the introduction of so-called sharding, which takes time to test.

Unfortunately, the merger had a negative impact on the cryptocurrency’s price: not only did it not rise, but it also saw a noticeable drop. All due to too high expectations, because usually in such a situation immediately after the event itself the price of the asset goes down, while on the news about it it goes up.

Etherium exchange rate this month


We believe that the full effect of the merger on the Etherium ecosystem can be assessed over a longer period of time. In at least a few months, the altcoin team will prepare important upgrades, including one that will allow validators to withdraw their ETH from the deposit smart contract. According to the developers, they plan to implement the feature within 6-12 months.

In the meantime, it is clear that many professional investors are indeed not disappointed with digital assets. The merits of cryptocurrencies in this case clearly outweigh their exchange rate situation.


What do you think about it? Share your opinion in our Millionaire Crypto Chat. We talk about more interesting topics from the blockchain world there as well.