Trying to unravel what’s going on in the web3 markets
The web3 market is a mess. Enough is happening that it will take us a moment to unpack the situation this morning, but the leading sentiment indicators in the blockchain ecosystem are nasty enough to set the stage: Bitcoin is down around 13% in the last 24 hours at $23,436; ETH is around 15% off over the same time period at $1,219; The Solana token is down roughly 15% in the last day at $26.75. All three tokens are down roughly 26%, 36%, and 39%, respectively, over the last week.
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The biggest cause for concern this morning appears to be a crisis at Celsius Networks, which raised a large amount of venture capital last year and today halted withdrawals after its token crashed. This doesn’t mean there’s no money flowing in the startup world; even some less tech-focused ideas are busy collecting big checks, as TechCrunch noted today. But in the blockchain domain, what is going on? Let’s take a minute to explore that same question from a few different angles.
What the hell is going on?
While I’m not TechCrunch+’s crypto expert (that title belongs to recent hire Jacquelyn Melinek), I’ve put together a list of issues as I see them that are currently tripping up the web3 market, including everything from crypto to finance decentralized to non-fungible tokens. They are, vaguely:
