Crypto winter is a term that has been going around for over three months. We know that the current situation is peculiar, to say the least. BTC has been losing ground, but the crypto community is not panicking. Many are happy that now they can buy low and hold waiting for the asset to appreciate in the future. The Ethereum merge is an event that may create a period of complete chaos, but the network will recover even if something goes wrong.
In general, the whole community of crypto enthusiasts remains optimistic despite the strong Bear Run that we are seeing right now. Many crypto assets confidently outperform traditional investment instruments such as valuable commodities and blue chip stocks. The whole global economy is in a recession. Nevertheless, Bitcoin and Ethereum holders are hopeful and do not lose composure.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the NFT market which saw a massive crash with transaction volume falling by more than 90% over the last 6 months. Some strong assets like BAYC and Crypto Punks are still doing fine, but other projects are losing their investors rapidly. Another interesting thing is that some scammers and “artists” are making millions by simply faking popular NFTs.
One of the worst issues with the whole NFT market is that buyers are rarely educated about non-fungible tokens. The vast majority of purchasers don’t even know how to use Etherscan to verify the authenticity of tokens they pay millions for. As a result, we have a market flooded by fake monkeys and punks.
The absence of regulation and the hands-off approach employed by marketplaces like OpenSea make it hard for serious investors to dive into the ecosystem and use it like millionaires use the high art industry, to, at least, avoid taxes. We need regulations in the domain of NFTs. Even more responsible self-regulation would drastically change the landscape of the industry. Currently, we have a freefalling market where scammers run rampant.
Thankfully, we still have good NFT projects and interesting use cases. The only thing we are lacking is some form of oversight.