Bear Market May Last Another ’12 to 18 Months’ Says Solana Co-Founder

Anatoly Yakovenko, the co-founder of Solana Labs, believes that the current crypto bear market may last for another 12 to 18 months. 

Speaking on the GM Podcast, the creator of the Solana blockchain attributed his expectation to the Fed rate hike influencing the macroeconomic environment. He, however, anticipates that as was evident in other bear markets, projects that focus on building during this brutal period will come out successful in the end. 

“Looking at macro stuff, my guess is there’s probably 12 to 18 months more of this brutal Fed rates going up. But there is an end to it. And just like the last bear market, a lot of teams that built and focused on product-market fit, and really tried to build amazing products—a lot of those succeeded, I think, in a very dramatic way,” Yakovenko said. 

The Ukraine-born computer scientist is not alone in expecting a drawn-out bear market in which projects can strengthen themselves. In an interview with Forbes, Úrsula O’Kuinghttons, director of communications and partnerships at Web3 Foundation and Polkadot, revealed that the “crypto winter” is a turning point as it will bring new players with greater knowledge to the market. 

“The crypto market has plummeted, but it will survive. We are definitely at a turning point, where new players in the ecosystem arrive with greater knowledge of the market… while the builders will continue to develop blockchain technology, regardless of the histrionics of the market,” she said. 

How ready is Solana for the bear market?

While projects remain hopeful in the bear market, cryptocurrencies have continued to take a beating. SOL, the native token of the Solana blockchain, has not been an exception in this trend. SOL is down 80.4% year to day, currently trading at around $33.44 per data from CryptoRank. 

Added to the bear market, the price of SOL has also been rocked by lingering technical issues with the layer 1 blockchain. The Solana blockchain has suffered several significant downtimes, with the most recent, which lasted around six hours, occurring last week.

While this has drawn a lot of criticism to Solana, the blockchain network has continued to make remarkable progress thanks to its high throughput and low transaction fees. Solana’s share of total NFT trading volume increased from 7% to 24% in 6 weeks as the network gained market share from Ethereum, according to data noted by cryptocurrency research platform Delphi Capital. 

Solana's share of total NFT trading volume has increased from 7% to 24% over the past 6 weeks. 👀 pic.twitter.com/zpAmz9UkTH

— Delphi Digital (@Delphi_Digital) September 29, 2022

This is in addition to new projects that are cropping up on the Solana blockchain and startups in the Solana ecosystem that have been performing well in their funding rounds.