Chainlink co-founder: current crypto bear market feels different

Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov said the current crypto market downturn feels different from past bear markets. He noted market cycles are normal but reveal industry progress, with crypto market capitalization down 44% from its October all-time high of $4.4 trillion and nearly $2 trillion leaving the space in four months.

Unlike earlier drawdowns such as FTX and 2022 lending failures, there have been no major institutional collapses, he wrote on X: “There have been no large risk management failures leading to large institutional failures or widespread systemic risks.” Nazarov pointed to tokenized real-world assets (RWA) and on-chain perpetual contracts as drivers that are accelerating independently of crypto prices.

RWA.xyz shows tokenized RWA on-chain value has increased 300% over the past 12 months, suggesting that having real-world assets on-chain “is not tightly coupled to cryptocurrency prices but provides its own unique value that can grow irrespective of market pricing of Bitcoin or other crypto assets,” he said.

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