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Except for a few rare exceptions, cryptocurrency investing in 2022 has led to a disastrous return. Top tokens like Bitclin and Ethereum have lost more than two thirds of their value, while many smaller coins are down by as much as 90% from their all-time highs.
Yet the crypto market has a long track record of recovering from bear markets in spectacular fashion. When crypto falls it must bounce back - or at least, that has been the pattern until now. The foremost example of this is Bitcoin, which reached an all time high of just under $20,000 in late 2017, only to see its value slowly but surely erode over the next two years. It finally bottomed out at just over $3,000 before a recovery took place.
Investors who held on through those trying times were rewarded for their patience though, as BTC looked almost unstoppable in its next bull run, its price ultimately climbing to just shy of $70,000 in November 2021.
Now we're in the thick of a new crypto winter and things appear to be moving much faster. Many tokens have lost so much value that investors believe the bottom is surely within sight already. If so, then what of the next bull run? When will that emerge?
While no one can really predict when the market will rebound, we can certainly guess where it might begin and which tokens will be leading the way. To date, fewer crypto markets have suffered as much as India, where token prices recently reached new lows amid a sudden liquidity crunch at the country's top crypto exchanges.
It was all thanks to a new law in India that introduced tax on crypto transactions - the result was that wary traders pulled a lot of their holdings from exchanges, causing trading volume to sharply drop. The price of the biggest crypto assets plummeted, with BTC falling below $18,000 at one point, despite the world's top crypto trading at around $20,000 on most global exchanges.
One of the worst hit Indian projects was GAR NetworkI, which lost a stunning 87% of its value after a whale dumped millions of dollars worth of tokens on an exchange while liquidity was low. GARI is the native cryptocurrency of Chingari, a popular video sharing app that's often described as India's TikTok. Chingari is one of the most popular apps in India, with more than 40 million daily active users to its name - helped in no small part by a decision from India's government to ban TikTok in the country.
With GARI, Chingari is aiming to transform the so-called "creator economy" around the concept of "Create-to-Earn". The plan is that Chingari app users can earn rewards in GARI tokens for creating content, sharing it, liking things and so on. It's proven to be a big hit, with more than 800,000 active GARI wallets according to the latest update from Chingari.
The early success of GARI, which only launched last year, made its sudden price drop all the more surprising - after all, it's a viable project with solid tokenomics and a clear use case, not to mention it has an absolutely huge audience to tap into. With that in mind, there are good reasons to think GARI could soon bounce back, and who knows, perhaps even lead the next bull run?
It wouldn't be the first time this has happened. Indian crypto fans may recall a similar incident that hit Polygon a few years back. Just a few months after launching its MATIC token, Polygon fell victim to market manipulation that saw a large number of tokens dumped on the market. It had exactly the same effect, effectively wiping out MATIC's value. The token's price dropped by more than 70% in the space of a few hours, leading to all kinds of accusations labeling the project as a scam etc.
Today it's a completely different story. Polygon has recovered and gone on to become one of the most iconic blockchain projects of recent times. Polygon leads the way as the most popular Ethereum scaling solution and played a key role in attracting billions of dollars of new money into the crypto and DeFi ecosystems throughout 2021's bull run. Even mpw, amid this latest crypto winter, MATIC remains a top twenty token by market cap.
While GARI is a very different project, it's not beyond the realms of possibility that it could play a key role in dragging the market out of its current decline. Social media monetization is an extremely promising and viable use case for blockchain that is only just being tested now, and Chingari is pioneering that effort. If the creator economy catches on, GARI will surely get in on the action, powering the way for users to create-and-engage-to-earn.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2022-07-14/will-next-crypto-bull-market-run-come-india
