Despite the market crash, these crypto OGs are still "recharging their faith."

Editor's Note: On February 6, Bitcoin fell as low as $60,000, a 15.48% drop in a single day, marking the largest single-day decline since the FTX crash. Simultaneously, the cryptocurrency fear and greed index dropped to 9, plunging the market into a state of "extreme panic," a new low since the 2022 bear market.

However, as pessimism spread, many veteran builders and thought leaders in the crypto world voiced different opinions. This "Crypto Faith Recharge List" compiles their reflections and perseverance during the storm. Perhaps it can offer you a glimmer of comfort and direction during this market downturn.

Michael Saylor:

If you want to give me a birthday present, then buy yourself some Bitcoin!

Base founder:

Thirteen years have passed, and I'm not going anywhere.

There is still a lot to be built.

Solana Foundation Chairwoman Lily Liu:

Blockchain has been, and will always be, a financial technology. Its core purpose is financialization.

This is why, when designing a chain, protecting the uniformity of liquidity is more important than almost anything else.

I'm glad that all the misguided ideas surrounding "blockchain games" have finally come to an end.

More broadly, the "read write own" / "Web3 narrative" approach is inherently too skeuomorphic, and frankly, a bit intellectually lazy. New technologies are never as simple as "put something on the blockchain and look—everything changes"; you have to actually create new markets.

The old narrative was more like a fig leaf, used to justify VCs throwing money into all sorts of unnecessary infrastructure, so that they could create a private asset that could become a "magical internet currency".

The more projects try to attract prices and grab a share of the liquidity of the "Wild West" of the internet through narrative packaging, the harder the "legitimizing narrative machine" that assigns value to these things has to work to shape everything into the "third wave of apps"—"everything you do today can make you money now."

The reality is that the opportunities are indeed enormous, far beyond what our most creative people could have imagined, but certainly not in the way they have been described in the past few years.

The journey of blockchain has always been about finance: providing open financial infrastructure for anyone and everyone on the internet.

This enables capital formation and internet innovation to occur anywhere in the world, and allows the resulting innovation and progress to truly take root. Open finance brings greater economic freedom, and economic freedom brings individual sovereignty and autonomy.

Balaji:

I have never been more bullish on cryptocurrencies than I am now.

Because the "rules-based order" is collapsing, while the "code-based order" is rising, short-term prices are irrelevant.

With the collapse of the international legal system, we need not only on-chain currencies, but also on-chain companies. Similarly, with the disintegration of the post-war order, we need a "post-internet order." The state will become ineffective, and the internet will take its place.

We need internet capitalism, we need internet democracy, we need internet privacy.

Therefore, we need cryptocurrency.

Helius Founder:

I have never been more confident about the future of cryptocurrency than I am now.

They let the tourists bleed to death, and then they left.

We need to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in this space, and that will achieve our goal.

trillion

Linda Xie:

I know the current market environment is tough. Hopefully, these experiences will be helpful to some. For me, the lowest point, both personally and professionally, was after launching a crypto liquidity fund in January 2018, when the market fell by 90%. Our fund experienced a shameful maximum drawdown of 75%, meaning it would have needed to quadruple to break even.

At the time, many investors chose to trust us (this was achieved after approximately 1,000 fundraising meetings), some of whom were people I deeply respected, and I felt I had let them down; some investors even yelled at me on the phone. I was extremely worried about what kind of situation I had led everyone into, including my employees. I had also invested almost all of my personal savings.

But we stuck to our convictions and were eventually rewarded after a few years (currently delivering approximately 4x DPI to investors). Hold onto assets you truly believe in based on their fundamentals, and don't make any extreme decisions driven by emotions.

Divine Fish:

1 BTC = 1 BTC