The inventor of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, gave an talking about the current state of the crypto market, its dynamics, and the impact of the crypto winter on developers. The second crypto by market cap has displayed a week with low volatility as it prepares to complete its migration to a Proof-of-Stake consensus with “The Merge”.
At the time of writing, Ethereum (ETH) trades at $1,610 and records a 3% profit in the last 24 hours and a 5% loss over the past week. Large cryptocurrencies have been moving sideways and might continue to see low volatility over the weekend.
ETH’s price moving sideways on the 4-hour chart. Source:
Vitalik Buterin sat down with Noah Smith and addressed the current downside pressure in the crypto market. The inventor of Ethereum has been in the space for over a decade, almost as long as it has existed, and is familiar with its constant ups and down.
In that sense, Vitalik Buterin said that the crypto market crash was not a surprise. In the past, the price of larger cryptocurrencies trended upwards for “around 6 to 9 months” before crashing, according to Buterin.
This time the bull run extended for one and a half years, beating expectations and surprising everyone familiar with the crypto market dynamics. Unlike new participants, attracted by rising prices and profits, Buterin claims he was sure the “bull market will end”, but was unsure when. He added:
When the prices are rising, lots of people say that it’s the new paradigm and the future, and when prices are falling people say that it’s doomed and fundamentally flawed. The reality is always a more complicated picture somewhere between the two extremes.
In that sense, the inventor of Ethereum confessed that he was a bit surprised about how long the last bull market lasted. However, he believes market participants might be “reading too much into what is ultimately cyclical dynamics”.
Can Ethereum Take Over “All The World’s Wealth”, Vitalik Buterin Replies
In other words, Buterin believes people might be trying to find a deeper meaning in the current price action, but crypto is trading following a historical cyclical pattern. As consequence, some projects in the space have been proven “unsustainable”.
This is the “good” or positive aspect of the crypto market’s cyclical dynamics, Buterin said referring to the collapse of the Terra ecosystem and those projects with a model unfit for bear markets. He added:
I don’t claim to have a cure for these dynamics, except my usual advice that people should remember the history of the space and take the long view of things.
Over time, Ethereum, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies built for the long run might perform like gold or equities, Buterin believes. The current volatility in the sector comes from an “existential uncertainty”, as time goes by, people stop wondering about the future of crypto.
As this uncertainty clears, volatility in the crypto market reduces, but bull runs provide investors with diminishing returns. Buterin believes bull and bear markets exaggerate two different views: crypto is going to disappear versus crypto will take over the world’s finances.
The inventor of Ethereum believes a truth might be found in the middle ground. Buterin concluded:
The math nerd way of putting it would be: the price of crypto is stuck in a bounded range (between zero and all the world’s wealth), and crypto can only stay highly volatile within that range for so long until repeatedly buying high and selling low becomes a mathematically almost-surely-guaranteed winning arbitrage strategy.
A literature major, Reynaldo Márquez has been deeply immersed in the crypto industry since 2017. His journey began with translating articles for various crypto news outlets, a role he took on with zeal. In 2018, amidst a challenging market, he embraced his first writing assignment, demonstrating his unwavering commitment to the nascent industry and the promise of change it bears for many people worldwide.
In March 2021, he joined the prestigious crypto news outlet NewsBTC and Bitcoinist, where he not only reported on the latest crypto news but also had the privilege of interviewing some of the industry's most influential figures. A year later, his dedication and hard work were recognized, and he was promoted to Managing Editor, a position he currently holds with pride.
He believes in honesty, good communication, hard work, and the power of cryptocurrency and its potential to transform people's lives, especially those alienated by the legacy financial system. Born in 1992 in Venezuela, Reynaldo is familiar with how governments and central banks can negatively affect people, their everyday lives, and their futures by creating inflation and erasing their hopes for a better future. Thus, like many Venezuelans, he embraced this new technology to help him and his family navigate difficult times.
In another life, Reynaldo would have pursued a career as an investigator, most likely tracking down the origins of the Cyberpunk movement with the publication of William Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer.’ The intersection between fiction and reality, with the materialization of Bitcoin in 2009, would have allowed him to dive deep into the crypto sphere as something more than a financial phenomenon but also a cultural shift in society that was brewing since the XX century, and maybe even sooner, in the XIX century with the publication of Henry David Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience.’
But that’s for another life. In this one, Reynaldo has been trading to improve his trading skills. Since 2023, he has been trying to learn Python to create successful strategies and find ways to execute them. It is a difficult task, which continues to keep him busy today and will most likely continue to keep him busy in the near and long term.
In his free time, he enjoys lifting heavy objects, reading, watching movies, and listening to his favorite music. Some of his favorite authors are Walt Whitman, William Faulkner, Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Raymond Carver, Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, Mario Vargas Llosa, Reinaldo Arenas, Rafael Cadenas, and many others. Lately, he has been primarily interested in reading about dystopic societies, a topic that deeply resonates with the crypto industry.
Since 2023, he has lived in Spain with his wife. He loves the weather, the food, and the people and their culture. They both expect to travel much more within the country they now call home and beyond its border. He hopes to retire with his wife, maybe in a quiet place near a beach, but most likely in a city close to a library and a university with his kids and, hopefully, grandkids.
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