A newbie’s guide to surviving crypto winter

The first rule of surviving crypto winter is to unlearn bad habits from the bull market — like chasing quick gains driven by hype or following influencers whose popularity vastly exceeds their expertise.

Many investors come out of bull cycles believing that good technology, real users and solid products will naturally translate into protection in a downturn. While these projects are still a better bet over the long run than a portfolio of vaporware and memecoins, even coins with good fundamentals dive when liquidity disappears and bull posters go into hibernation.

Patience becomes the key to survival.

What crypto winter?

But are we even in a crypto winter, or is this just a lengthy but temporary pullback due to geopolitical uncertainty? Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan believes we’ve been in crypto winter since January 2025, while Bitmine’s Tom Lee argues we are now in the final stages of a “mini-crypto winter.”

The current market downturn didn’t become readily apparent until the flash crash of Oct. 10, when Bitcoin lost 15% in a day. Bitcoin has since recorded five consecutive losing months. March offered some relief by snapping that streak, but the Iran war and surging oil prices have put a lid on risk assets, even if Bitcoin has performed better than macro markets.

Bear markets reshape behavior, filter participants and expose which habits actually hold up when liquidity dries up. For crypto winter rookies, the key is patience and laying the groundwork for the next upswing, according to Annabelle Huang, co-founder and CEO of Altius Labs.

“It is a good time to start learning because you are already getting filtered content from [people who are] committed to this more difficult time and not just here to capitalize when everything is going up,” Huang tells Magazine.

“Even from a builder perspective, I’m not getting inquiries or getting distracted by everyone supposedly wanting to build everything,” she says. 

The voices that survive crypto winters

In bull markets, attention often flows to the loudest voices. For investors navigating a downturn, filtering who to listen to becomes part of the survival strategy.

Connor Howe is the CEO and co-founder of cross-chain infrastructure project Enso and has been building in the industry since 2016. To him, the worst advice he has encountered from online crypto gurus is, “Buy the dip, it can’t go lower.”

“I’ve heard that sentence for Bitcoin at $40,000, $20,000 and $15,000. Famous last words every time,” Howe tells Magazine.

Some influencers are incentivized to act against the interests of their own followers, who end up as exit liquidity for paid promotions.

But they aren’t always vampiric. Influencers play an important role in the crypto world. Many users turn to them for information, while projects partner up to tell stories, rally the fans and expand reach.

So influencers are likely here to stay. Howe says the trick to surviving a crypto winter is to listen to the social media voices with battle scars.

“Not the ones who went quiet in 2022 and reappeared in 2024. The ones who were posting technical breakdowns and lessons learned during the worst of it,” Howe says.

“The so-called ‘gurus’ with yachts in their bios are a character in a simulator: possibly entertaining, but don’t build your financial future on their [X] threads and Telegram calls. Instead, listen quietly to those who are still here after multiple winters — they’re the ones with frostbite and wisdom.”

What survives when the hype dies

In the bull market that preceded the 2022 FTX fiasco, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) were crowned as the next big thing, though most are now worthless.

In the subsequent bull market, memecoins took over as the latest crypto casino, though most were worthless to begin with. The memecoin frenzy even drew in celebrities and several world leaders, including US President Donald Trump.

For crypto market participants who follow the industry even when prices are down, crypto winters offer a sneak peek at what may drive the next wave. There’s never a better time to invest in a narrative than before it becomes the focus of mainstream hype like the Metaverse did in 2022 (provided you can pick it correctly, of course).

On the retail side, perpetual decentralized exchanges, or perp DEXs like Hyperliquid and Aster, demonstrated 24/7 trading when the Iran war broke out over the weekend of Feb. 28. Prediction markets have also been on the rise, though they are locked up in regulatory battles across multiple regions.

Crypto now has an institutional layer as well, where interest is flowing into tokenized assets and stablecoins, according to Huang.

“Even though Web3-native activity has slowed, this TradFi-onchain intersection continues to grow. There’s also curiosity around whether new categories like AI or agent-based systems will emerge, but it may still be too early,” Huang adds.

A different kind of crypto winter

There have been at least four major Bitcoin crashes so far that kick-started prolonged bear markets. The most recent was the initial coin offering (ICO) bubble that burst in early 2018, and the contagion effects that spread like wildfire following the Terra-LUNA and FTX downfalls.

For crypto projects, making it through crypto winter is one of the biggest challenges they’ll ever face. 

“When the ICO collapsed, nothing broke inside the company because we had everything to build and prove,” Christophe Diserens, chief wealth officer at SwissBorg, tells Magazine. The company launched in 2018 through an ICO.

“But given the market conditions, the trust of investors was shaken, and we were publicly attacked on social media by investors and media who wrongly labelled us as a scam, out of lack of understanding and/or to generate views,” he adds.

Diserens claims the company survived through its “Swiss” management strategy. 

“To be sure that we would stay alive, we have always made sure we had enough bankroll to fund at least the next 12 months,” he says.

The current bear market is quite different from past cases. Unlike the crypto winters that kicked off in 2018 and 2022, there wasn’t a particular trend that blew up or a multi-billion project that went bust.

Huang says this is a sign of crypto’s maturity. At the start of the last bull cycle, institutional inflows into Bitcoin and Ether were supercharged by ETFs and corporate treasury strategies.

“With that premise, inherently Bitcoin and Ethereum are also very correlated to the rest of the risk assets or even safe haven assets, because it’s the same allocators managing risk across their entire portfolio,” Huang says.

The cold-hearted crypto market isn’t a meritocracy

One of the most persistent beliefs carried over from bull markets is that strong fundamentals offer protection when things turn. Howe claims that assumption does not hold up in practice.

“I genuinely believed that if you were building something real, with actual utility, honest architecture and genuine users, then the market would treat you differently in a downturn. It doesn’t,” Howe says. “The market is not a meritocracy.”

In a crash, even strong projects get pulled down, though not always to the same extent. The differentiation tends to emerge after the selloff, when recovery speed separates durable survivors from short-lived shitcoins. 

“Your job during a bull run isn’t to be recognized, it’s to survive long enough for the bear market to do the sorting for you,” says Howe. “The projects still building in month 18 of a crypto winter aren’t there by accident.”

That disconnect between perception and reality also shapes how projects are built and marketed in the first place. Diserens says many teams are still repeating the same mistakes from previous cycles.

“Too many projects still play the pump game to attract attention and users,” he says. “They spend too much of their treasury on boosting their brand and inflating their token price.”

What gets rewarded in a bull market is often visibility. But during crypto winters, projects can no longer rely on narrative, momentum or marketing to carry them. Over time, the market corrects by leaving stronger projects standing when the ice melts.