https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/2202764/44405282-89f8e100-a561-11e8-9177-14047e52e41e.jpg When It's Good It's Great, but When It's Bad It's Awful These are the words that currently best describe the cryptocurrency and blockchain world. People were euphoric when there were "Sick Gainz" to be made, and every single project seemed like they're shattering the existing industries. It looks like there was no wrong move and every project was delivering incredible results because the price just kept rising. However, was the sudden rise of cryptocurrency related to the project progress or just baseless market speculation? # Where did it all go wrong? The cryptocurrency space got caught in an "echo chamber". Meaning that fewer and fewer people were doing their research. Instead, following trends or opinions of others became the norm. This kind of behaviour resulted in a cycle where: 1. People buy cryptocurrency because they expect prices to rise. 2. This buying behaviour pushes the price up. 3. People continue to buy because they're afraid of missing out. 4. This further projects that the price is going to rise. These 4 steps kept repeating themselves, and without any significant signs of the trend going to stop, people become euphoric, and their measurement of success for each project became the price, not the project itself. People got addicted to an unsustainable strategy of 10x 15x 20x returns. And this became the norm, not the exception. No other industry works like this, and no other industry has such a polarising split between communities. Some people care deeply about the projects, the tech behind them. They want to see a sustainable business built and mass adoption achieved - these people would best be described as long-term hodlers And then some people are in it for the money. As the blockchain technology didn't generate much buzz until there was money to be made. As soon as there's money to be made, people jump on it as their golden ticket. Not fully realising what they're getting into and how this impacts their future - these people would best be described as short-term traders There's a place for both, but once one side massively outnumbers the other - there's chaos. # Projects are Judged by Price - Not Progress Humans are rational individuals. It's in our nature to rationalise everything that's happening around us. This is both a blessing and a curse. Meaning that, once most of the cryptocurrency projects were caught in the echo chamber of success people quickly started rationalising that if the price is rising there has to be some reason to it. It was hard to tell what was impacting the bull markets and it was tough to believe that this could just be happening due to a state of mind, not technological advancements. The only rational and logical explanation is that the more good news you bring out - the better this will reflect on your cryptocurrency. People quickly started associating such announcements: 1. News from the developers 2. Exchange listings 3. Partnerships 4. Conferences 5. Legalities As part of the infamous good news cycle. It's all about trying to rationalise the market behaviour with variables we can see. https://media.giphy.com/media/3o7abA4a0QCXtSxGN2/giphy.gif As cryptocurrency slowly started its decline, people were expecting more and more frequent cycles of good news . There had to be a reason for a sudden decline, and once again our rational minds stepped in to help. People were convinced that the sudden decline had to mean that the project was performing worse. More often than not - this wasn't the case. However, this lead blockchains projects to be more transparent than any other industry. Always sharing, communicating and collaborating - which is a good thing :) # Are Projects Worse now Than They Were Before? When it comes to cryptocurrency, the previous cycles opened up a gate of extremely transparent communication. Most projects are very active on their social media, they listen and interact with the community. A significant portion of blockchain oriented projects are BETTER now than they were before. This is a direct result of projects trying to keep up with the high hype demands and increasing their production speed. In the case of BitDegree, we've made incredible progress since December. 1. Beta product release 2. Userbase growth 3. More employees 4. And a real-life interest of the project, with people using BDG tokens for the intended purpose, not just on exchanges. https://media.giphy.com/media/zkzKGK9FG9RYI/giphy.gif Rationalisation lead us to a situation where the success of a project now depends on the metrics you look at. The vicious hype cycles have left this space full of exit schemes, manipulation, false claims and a lot of angry people. We're happy to be the exact opposite. Advocating legal compliance, product development and real-world usage. There's recently been an article floating around ( we believe it to be pre-paid by our competitors, but it illustrates the point we're making beautifully) that goes something like this - [BitDegree (BDG) Platform Grows, Token Still Struggles](https://cryptovest.com/news/bitdegreebdg-platform-grows-token-still-struggles/) The article acknowledges how our product is growing. The user base is rising. And yet the token is declining. Is this necessarily a bad thing? Not at all. We're building a reputable organisation, a real company. Not just a show of smoke and mirrors. Seeing incredible growth on the product side of thing is the best thing we could have hoped for. It's natural that long-term value comes from a product that's so good users have little to no choice, but to use it. Gamification, scholarships, token incentives. There's so much unexplored potential here that it's entirely unreasonable to expect an altogether self-sustaining business from scratch in just half a year. We're focusing on fundamentals at this moment, and it really shows. Building our product and gaining traction with over 60 thousand students already enrolled. Around 2 thousand new students join each week. We're also expanding our content library rapidly. When push comes to shove - great content and value to the customer bring success. And everyone who's involved shares the success of BitDegree We're hitting every single deadline and milestone and even overdeliver in most cases. Keeping production ahead of schedule and gaining traction faster than we thought we would. These are all key points that a successful business is looking for. There's the argument that the market paints a whole different story with BitDegree token showing decline. It's quite an odd situation where in the eyes of the market projects were valued more when they had nothing to show for their product except for their idea. And this trend is continuing. Some projects are listed on top exchanges, which generate thousands of dollars worth of transactions all without having a product or a use-case or even a team behind the project. How sustainable is a strategy where you have no product or userbase or even development plans? These kinds of projects invest upwards to several million dollars to get listed on exchange platforms. They pay bot services to manipulate the price and volume. The cost of these services certainly doesn't help with product development. However, the community is happy to see green and big numbers. Why aren't people fighting against projects misallocating contributions? We believe it's the short-term mentality. People get caught up in the present and trick themselves into consuming false information. As cryptocurrency by nature is exciting, every day you see radical shifts on Coinmarketcap. It's exciting, and when the excitement stops, it feels like the end. https://i.imgur.com/P8bnuEo.jpg?1 # The Market Does What it Does - Can we Fight it? There are estimations that up to 90% of all trades that take place on exchanges are between bots. With such alarming numbers, it's important not to get lost in this cycle. That's why we're focusing on developing our product and growing our user base. As BitDegree gains popularity there will be more and more people looking to buy BDG Tokens to spend on the service. We understand how important education is, we want to create a platform where everyone could learn and grow together. Excellent service always brings more customers and customers are the driving force behind every significant company. We've added additional payment models and are working to integrate those into the BDG eco-system you can find more information about that on our Medium blog [BitDegree Tokenomics & Payment Models. ](https://blog.bitdegree.org/bitdegree-tokenomics-payment-models-introducing-eth-btc-fiat-payments-in-the-future-75d865f122c2?utm_source=steempg&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=ign) We're a company that's focused on doing, not talking. We're always on top of any new developments. We have a strong vision for the future and no plans of slowing down production. BitDegree is lightyears ahead in mass adoption. The BitDegree website is already on par with TOP 10 projects if we take web-traffic into account. https://i.imgur.com/9PdRKzY.png https://i.imgur.com/RgZOH4r.png https://i.imgur.com/DOLEtSU.png Our tutorial blog alone generates around 400 thousand unique readers per months. We've expanded the team to more than 30 people and continue to work on all fronts. Marketing, developing, designing and all around building the business from the ground up. # Conclusion This period of cryptocurrency market reversal is an excellent opportunity for projects to show their worth and build up fundamental value. We've set our minds to value projects based on their statistics such as price, volume or exchange listings. But these statistics are no longer the best indicator of success. Market manipulation became such a dominant issue that even Coinmarketcap started taking actions. They don't take into account zero fee trading platforms where bots could push the currency back and forth with no cost forever. And, recently CMC has removed some exchange platforms from volume calculations because the exchanges were used to manipulate statistics and made up 99.9% of the volume of the project across the board. Projects that keep a healthy reputation when regulations kick-in. Projects that focus on long-term value and sustainable business ideas are the ones that bring the most value to the cryptocurrency space. And our goal is to be one such project.