Are We Really in a “Crypto Winter”

Crypto has an uncanny habit of convincing everyone, at some point, in every single cycle, that this is the end.

Right now is no different.

We kicked off 2025 with promises of a Trump-led crypto renaissance, regulatory clarity locked in, memecoin-fuelled lunacy, AI-crypto convergence, and bitcoin ripping above $100,000 expectedly on the march to $500,000 in what looked like a pure FOMO driven blow off top cycle.

Then April rolled around… and the market tanked.

Then we were fed the hopium of crypto strategy companies, bitcoin miners pivoting to AI compute, and crypto boomed once more taking Bitcoin to over $120,000 and the $500,000-plus target was back on the cards.

Then November rolls around…and the market tanks.

Cue the headlines, cue the bear posts, cue the “I told you so” brigade, cue Jim Cramer calling everything “consumer-oriented” in a bear market.

And cue the phrase everyone loves to dust off whenever crypto stops going up in a straight line for five minutes… Crypto Winter.

But here’s the thing…

This isn’t a winter.

And if you really want to get me to be specific, we’ve never actually had a crypto winter.

If you’ve been in crypto long enough, and I have, now into my 15^th year with it all, then you’ll know none of this is to be overly worried about.

Sure, it sucks, but really, this is just a cycle playing out, and while timing isn’t perfect, I see no change to the long-term view that bitcoin hits $1 million and the altcoin market sees a boom the size we’ve never witnessed before.

Now, I’m confident a good chunk of people who just read that are about to stop reading. They’ll think I’m an utter fraud, a “hype machine” as one reader recently wrote to us to say about me, and that all of this is finally crypto’s comeuppance.

And that’s fine. Stop now. But if you want to know why I say this, read on…

The year of over-promise… and under-delivery?

Let’s call a spade a spade here.

The Trump administration thus far has not delivered the fireworks the market was expecting.

Yes, some regulations have budged, yes, stablecoin frameworks are moving through Congress, yes, bitcoin made it onto the geopolitical stage in a way it never has before.

But the “Bitcoin Strategic Reserve”? The aggressive all-in nature of the Treasury? The sweeping “crypto capital of the world” promised to the industry?

Not yet. Not fully. Not in a way the market can actually feel.

Truth is that everything that’s really moved the needle this year has come from crypto native “buidlers”. The organisations that have been around the industry for a while, know what it’s all about, know that you can never rely on a centralised authority to really make a difference, and that if you want something done in crypto…you do it yourself.

That’s why 2025 might be full of empty promises from governments, treasuries and central banks… but then again, is that any great surprise?

Meanwhile, when bitcoin slides 25%, every sceptic rushes to their keyboard to declare a new winter is here.

But the truth is this: the foundations of the crypto economy have never been stronger.

What we’re seeing unfold right now, if you ignore prices for a moment is bigger than Trump, bigger than retail FOMO, bigger than corporate adoption, bigger the institutional buy in, bigger than AI.

If you zoom out, and I mean really zoom out and consider the last year alone, you see something completely different to the market vibes right now.

You see an industry that is reshaping the very fabric of modern finance.

Tokenisation isn’t a concept anymore. The idea of capital markets moving “onchain” is so real that it’s an inevitability. That’s right, you can expect everything from stocks to bonds, real estate and capital raisings to be done onchain inside the next 10 years.

Heck, my take is you’ll be trading stocks via an app that lives on a blockchain and the idea of the NYSE, NASDAQ, LSE or wherever will seem as antiquated as the days when I used to have to check the newspaper to get stock prices.

We’re already seeing this with Robinhood, eToro and Coinbase now actively promoting “tokenised equities” through their exchanges and platforms.

Then you look to the way in which stablecoins are exploding globally. From the US to Europe, UK, Japan and other parts of Asia. The realisation that you can do away with the intermediaries and middlemen in global finance has sort of woken up the system in 2025.

Now, stablecoins are something that BlackRock to JP Morgan to nation states are putting into place, and all are being built on blockchains like Ethereum and Solana.

Stablecoins aren’t a fringe experiment anymore. They’re easily the fastest-growing payment and settlement network on Earth and most people won’t know it, but inside a decade the way we move money will almost entirely be onchain.

Hence, onchain finance isn’t a way off hope or hyped-up dream; it’s a structural inevitability that is getting put into place now.

I think it’s easy for investors to get caught up in the short term. To look at crypto as nothing more than a trade.

But if you look at crypto as infrastructure, in the same way the market looks at AI now as infrastructure, then you start to figure out that price pullbacks aren’t anything to worry about, they’re great chances to take positions in structural global change for the next three, five, ten years.

It’s the rewiring of global markets, capital flows, identity, value, and ownership.

That idea alone transcends whatever bitcoin’s price happens to be on a random Wednesday.

The only way through this market… is time

To survive this market today, and future cycles where this inevitably happens again, you need one thing above all else…

Long-term logic in a short-term emotional market.

You need to remind yourself;

You’re investing in the infrastructure of the future global economy.

You’re investing in the rewiring of the banking system.

You’re investing in a settlement layer that will underpin trillions in tokenised assets.

You’re investing in the programmable money era.

You’re investing in the autonomous, AI-economy that lives onchain.

And you’re still early.

Sure, you’re not 2010 early, not 2013 early.

But early enough that most people still think this is a speculative fad. In a decade, they won’t be saying that. They’ll be using crypto infrastructure without even realising it.

So no, this isn’t a crypto winter.

This is a cycle behaving like a cycle, but under the hood, still buidling, still innovating, still marching on regardless of what governments might say or do.

I’ve been doing this for fifteen years.

I’ve been called everything from delusional to dangerous for saying this industry would reshape the world.

And yet… every cycle, every crash, every boom, every massive development… I’ve been right.

And I’ll say it again, nothing has changed.

If anything, everything I’ve argued for a decade is now visibly becoming reality. And ten years from today, you’ll look back on this moment in time and laugh at how small and silly it felt.

So now, it’s up to you. Your move…

Until next time,

Sam Volkering
Contributing Editor, Investor’s Daily