The majority of onboarding into the crypto space occurs during a bull market. The closer the bull market gets to its top, the faster the onboarding. _­Which, as you all know, is the worst time to get involved. If we were blessed with a rational population majority, we would see the total opposite occur, but the good news is, because most don’t think critically and rationally, and we do, the reward is much higher. After all, without this dominating mentality, bull and bear markets would not exist in the first place.

So, with all this in mind, and the fact that the cryptocurrency space is now more than 50% down from its all-time-highs last year, now is a good time to begin searching out new opportunities in the crypto-space. Now is when 10,000% ROIs are found. I’m not going to predict how much lower we go, or when the next bull cycle commences, this is not important right now. All we need to be doing is getting active in the space, get involved with project communities, educate ourselves more on upcoming projects, cryptocurrency in general and the solutions blockchain and decentralization can solve.

This pro-active approach in a bear market will pay dividends later on, even if you can’t see how right now.

All of my major profits have been made from my actions in a bear market. In April of 2013 when bitcoin went from $260 back to $50, I spent all my profits from that cycle on Bitcoin ASIC miners, I learnt everything there was to know about Bitcoin, I got involved with the infamous bitcointalk.org forum, Reddit communities and made Cryptocurrency my full-time education. By October of the same year, Bitcoin rose back up to $1200, I sold 50% of my bitcoin holdings at $1000 and the market collapsed, again.

This time I had three years before Bitcoin would rise to new levels, in this time however I bumped into a guy by the name of Jihan Wu from China via bitcointalk who had proposed to build the most powerful bitcoin ASIC to date, the proposal also made promises of ROIs far higher than anything the now defunct butterfly labs could offer with their ASICs. A casual bulk order was made on Bitcointalk between members of the group. We purchased 1000 units between about 50 of us. For those that don’t know, Jihan Wu is the founder of Bitmain, the largest ASIC supplier in the World.

I spent all my profits on new miners, all new minted bitcoins were sent back to Jihan Wu for new miners. I went from 2 ASICS up to around 20 ASICs. Whilst stumbling around trying to find the best mining pools, I came across a new cryptocurrency proposal, the whitepaper was released on the mining pool, the pool operator was the brains behind this new venture. His name was Vitalik Buterin and the project had what I thought a peculiar name, Ethereum.

Of course, I jumped on board this. After all, just a few dollars would give me hundreds of tokens. I didn’t invest much, I just wanted to play around with this new smart contract technology.

Alongside all of this, one of the exchanges I had signed up to on day one of its launch announced they would give all its first week sign-ups 100,000 XRP. At fractions of a cent, they were worthless, or near as damn it at the time, but hey, what was this new ripple thing?

Well, as it turned out, it wasn’t even a cryptocurrency exactly, just a distributed ledger, a digital currency if you like. I forgot about it, until early 2017 when it began to double, then double again in value. I sold my free Bitstamp giveaway of XRP tokens for a small fortune in Bitcoin, particularly if I was to of held on to those Bitcoin until today.

During the 2013 – 2017 bear market I learnt so much, made a lot of money and established myself within many of the cryptocurrency communities. Then came the 2017 Bitcoin bull run where I saw Bitcoin rise from the bear market low of around $150 to $20,000. Of course, I didn’t catch the top, but I did sell on the way up, and the way backdown to cover living costs until the next bull market. The rest remained in the only crypto stablecoin, Bitcoin.

Following the 2017 blow off top of $20k we saw yet another multiple year bear market, once again I delved into new projects, took in free crypto where possible, got involved with crypto-backed social media platforms like Steem, LBRY, Pocketnet. I sold all my miners for bitcoin as mining ROI in the UK had become negligible at best.

My point is, just about all success I have had in this space has been gained during a bear market. This is where the real work begins, this is where great opportunity presents itself, even if you don’t recognise it at the time. You need to play the long game, rather than looking for ‘to the moon!’ 1000x overnight ROIs. Now is the time, and if you make the effort, if you ditch the Netflix or drinks with friends for late nights on discord, Reddit and crypto forums, you will do very well. Educate yourself, use the technology, understand all the processes of blockchain and cryptography, interact with communities, offer your help on Github, even if it’s just to correct documentation errors or assist in language translations. Our efforts are often rewarded, if not now, they will show their face down the road.

What am I doing?

My first port of call has been to put all my various cryptocurrency accounts in order, organize them and ensure everything I have is safe and secure in new, untraceable wallets. This isn’t so much to avoid the prying eyes of the state, but to avoid any malicious entities out there. It’s also a good time to reassess which trading platforms you use, and setup new, fresh accounts as well as services which provide debit cards that allow crypto-spending. I also like to find new crypto-friendly fiat bank accounts to use for each new bull run.

My next phase is looking into new projects out there, joining their communities and interacting with the team. One project I am following consistently is the Panther Protocol, which I briefly discussed last week.

As I said before, I still have concerns surrounding the project, but if they can deliver what they promised, I believe this project will rise to the top pretty quickly. By interacting with new projects, you can often take part in bug testing of new features. For example, the Panther Protocol has just given away 100k in its native token ZKP to those who tried out their new advanced staking process on the Polygon chain. For those that didn’t read about it in the last newsletter, the Panther Protocol gives anonymity to any other crypto asset using zero-knowledge proofs.

I’m also following crypto-gaming closely, we’ve talked about the metaverse quite a bit over the past few months, and I still think this sector of the market will do well over the next few years, but earn-to-play gaming is possibly going to have its day before true metaverse projects. There are hundreds if not thousands of crypto-games out there, some have all promise and no project, some have both but are awful, and some actually are gaining traction.

Typically, I find the more complex the developers try to make it, the less successful the game actually is. In gaming, gameplay is everything, and for great gameplay sometimes simple is better. Just look at the success of Minecraft and Among Us, two very simple games and very visually primitive games, and yet they have taken the World by storm.

One of the projects I’m currently researching is  Battle of Guardians, a person Vs Person (PVP) game where players can trade their characters, even rent out their characters and put them to battle with another player to earn rewards. The in-game currency is BGS which is currently ranked at #4463 on Coinmarketcap.com.

I typically like projects which list no higher than #1000 by market capital, and prefer as low as #4500, these projects are early days, offer free tokens in airdrops, or faucets offering free tokens to simply try out their games, services, contracts ect. I also like them because I can invest just a small amount, as little as 50 to 100 bucks and either reap a nice 1000x profit, or if all fails, deal with a minor loss. This strategy has worked well for me over the years, as it only takes one out of ten to succeed to make a significant profit.

One final area of the cryptoverse I believe is worth delving into is the DEX based tools, contracts and assets. Projects like Gelato(GEL) are going to change how we trade in the future on DEX platforms. Anyway, I’ll say no more, do your own digging, see what holes you fall into and what gems you pull out, just remember, gems can take a little polishing before their true value is revealed.

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