Fed-driven crypto bear market could last another 12-18 months: Solana’s co-founder

It’s been a rough few months for crypto after collapse of Terra in May, sending shockwaves throughout the market. But crypto prices had been trickling down for months at that point, and financial markets across the board have been hit hard this year as inflation rises.

How much longer will the bear market last? Estimates vary widely, but many in the crypto space don’t think we’ll see another bull run anytime soon. And you can count Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko among them.

On last episode of Decrypthis gm podcast, Yakovenko pointed to continued pain in the markets for some time to come, citing the impact of the US Federal Reserve’s ongoing rate hikes. But Yakovenko also told co-hosts Dan Roberts and Stacy Elliott that he is optimistic about an eventual return to crypto market growth

“Looking at the macro stuff, I guess there’s probably 12 to 18 more months of these brutal Fed rate hikes,” he said. “But there is an end to it. And just like the last bear market, a lot of teams built and focused on product markets and really tried to build amazing products—many of them succeeded, I think, in a very dramatic way.”

Solana has been no exception to the broader crypto market decline, with the price of SOL down 81% since the start of 2022 per data from CoinGecko. The Layer-1 blockchain network has also had three significant periods of downtime this year, including one last weekwhich Yakovenko addressed in the episode.

But Solana has also seen growth and continued momentum despite the macro slowdown and technical issues. Solana’s The NFT market is still growing despite the lower price of SOL and the falling value of some collectibles, plus new projects is being built steadily on the network. Yakovenko also pointed to Solana startups raising money at “still quite high values” despite the crypto winter.

His comments come before Solana’s annual Breakpoint conference in Lisbon, Portugal in early November. After debuted last yearBreakpoint is already considered by some to be a fixture on Web3 conference circuit. Yakovenko sees the event as an opportunity to take stock of everything in the Solana ecosystem over the past year: the good, the bad and the ugly.

“We call it Breakpoint because it’s kind of a break,” he said with a laugh. “But I think it’s important – to take a break and then look back at what we’ve achieved, what the challenges were in the last year, and really energize everyone to keep building.”

When asked if he expects a different mood for this year’s Breakpoint compared to the 2021 debut, at a time when the price of SOL rose to new heights, Yakovenko replied (again with a laugh): “Are people going to be depressed and gloomy. ? I don’t know, honestly.”

He observed that “people still have fun” when they’re on Solana Spaces store or at Solana’s development-centric Hacker Houses events, and wondered aloud if the resilient attitude is because developers have already lived through multiple crypto market cycles.

“They’re like, ‘Well, here we go again. We might as well make the best of it,'” Yakovenko said. “So they tend to have a pretty good attitude about it.”

listen to the whole episode of the gm podcast wherever you get your podcasts and make sure subscribe.