What you are going to read hear as follows may be challenging, highly controversial and not intended as any financial advice.

This article arises from the effects of comparisons between similar events in 2018 and this year.

Let’s remind the record levels of both years:

Bitcoin

December 2017 – Around 20,000 USD

April 2021 – 64,4000 USD

Ethereum

January 12th  2018 – 1,448 USD

May 12th 2021– 4,356 USD

ADA

January 5th 2018 -  1.09 USD

May 16th 2021 – 2.45 USD

When I started to observe the trend of decreasing crypto prices vs fiat (USD, EUR, GBP, etc.) I immediately thought in the year 2018.

There is often one question that a lot of people think or openly ask:

How low can we get to?

I base some of my crypto acquisition on percentual declines, fundamentals, level of confidence.

What is the difference between bear market in 2018 vs today?

First of all, the rate  of crypto adoption is much higher today than before. There have been enormous advances, especially with Bitcoin Adoption and ERC-20 projects.

There were almost no descentralized exchanges back then, most of the cryptocurrency exchanges have been highly centralized.

There were much less participants and crypto spread much more in the last 3 years.

A lot of institutions started mass crypto adoption, Tesla company, Paypal, and other well recognized brands and companies.

A lot of people became crypto holders, they earned and also lost money in bull runs and short term bear runs.

When I started to compare this year with 2018, some people and even me, thought this is like extremely negative point of comparison and I thought the same. But it is not the same, no current event will be exactly like the previous one.

Just a little background

Here I don’t analyze any confidence or fundamental stuff only the price level of those years.

Bitcoin rose from 1,800 USD in May 2017 to 20,000 USD in December 2018. Strong bull run around 8 months. Here Bitcoin increased around 11 times in 8 months.

3 years later, BTC got from 10,000 USD from October 2020 to 65,017 USD on April 14th 2021. In this occasion Bitcoin increased by 55,000 USD but only 6.5 times.

I don’t consider the lowest levels of the year 2017 and 2020, when Bitcoin reached the level below 5 K USD during Covid market shock in March.

The most shocking fact

When we think in the year 2018, some people can accuse me that it is only doom and gloom theory but this year’s fall is actually even worse.

Why is this market move worse than in 2018?

• It’s much faster fall for all altcoins

Just compare:

Bitcoin price reduced by 55% from its record highs on February 1st, 2018.  When it went from 20 K basically to 9 K. Aproximately 5 weeks.

In 2021, it took also 5 weeks 55% reduction from April 14th to May 19th. Bitcoin lost around 54%, but the amount in USD was much higher, it decreased by 36,000 dollars.

How about altcoins?

Ethereum

Ethereum in both years was pretty strong, and it came 2 weeks to the top on January 12th to 1448 USD.   By February 6th, it was only 785 USD. Around 45% down.

But May 2021 was much more challenging for Ethereum. Ethereum lost in less in 2 weeks, 50% of its value, however it recovered few days later.

So don't get me wrong, but ETH rise in market dominance may be over because ETH/BTC exchange rate is steadily declining.

Cardano

Reached its top on January 5th, 2018 at 1.09 USD. Only 1 month later it got to 0.33 USD, it decreased by 70%.

So in general there is one fact we can conclude except for Bitcoin itself, the fall of altcoins happens at much faster percentual rate than 3 years ago. It doesn’t matter if Ethereum is strong or Binance Coin is stronger than ever. Markets are rough and there may be a lot of surprises.

A lof BNB holders will not like what I will tell as follows, the fall of Binance Coin is much faster today than 3 years. Actually BNB only lost around 76% during all 2018, in 2021 Binance Coin lost almost 60% in less than 2 weeks.

Why is this happening?

Forget your current dogma; such as Elon Musk or China. There is something much more powerful than that:

It’s an excessive overvaluation of many alts. Just compare the insane growth of BNB from 13 USD to 680, the record percentual highs of Doge coin, which increased over 3,000% in less than 3 months and other alts such as Chain Games which increased 100 times in 3 or 4 months. Every altcoin has been increasing or decreasing according its current status.

Final Bottoms of 2018 & 2019

From record highs of 2017, BTC lost around 84% of its value to around 3,200 USD.

ETH went down from 1,448 to 80 USD, decline of 94%.

ADA declined from 1.09 USD to 0.028, decline of 97%.

This took approximately 12 -14 months depending on each cryptocurrency. The return was slow.

• This bear period could last not that long, it doesn’t have to last 1 year, maybe we are back on bull run autopilot by October 2021. This deduction comes from this acceleration factor.

• Certain fundamentals

There are a lot of positive news and great advances. However there is one fact in bear markets. Bears don’t care that much about positive news, they are mainly driven by certain negative impacts.

There are 4 possible risks:

• Very hostile regulation efforts toward cryptocurrencies on behalf of many governments and international financial agencies which is leading to create uncertainty in the market. This effort is also accompanied by all the negative fuzz in mass media. Let’s not forget all the buzz around stable coins, XRP and recent stuff related to BNB investigation.

• Stock Market decline

I am not into stockmarket but you can check on many youtube’s video on behalf of many professional traders and experts that there is a considerable risk of strong market decline in the following months.

Some traders even estimate it for June.

Can you imagine a stock market crash on June 10th for example?

Even if people flirt with the idea that Bitcoin will rise because a lot of people will go on the BTC train because of hyperinflation, just consider what happened in March of 2020 on stock market, when Bitcoin lost almost 50% in 1 single day.

• Certain risk of exist of institutional holders

Some companies got on crypto train but there are also a lot of shareholders who question the Boards all the stuff related to the performance of the portfolio. For us, cryptoholders fall of 50% is really bad but somehow still acceptable in case we had previous gains, but for traditional stock market investors it is a very negative scenario.

• Hodlers vs Speculators

In cryptocurrency markets there will be big masses of hodlers who will be attached to their Bitcoin or Ethereum and won’t let it go, no matter freaking what. But there will be people who will be speculating, selling off and buying dips. There we have the index of greed and feer, and at this moment we are located at extreme fear side. A lot of stuff is being said about whales.

Subsequent Shockwaves

In 2018, the first shockwave was from December to the beginning to February, then the decline was organized and coordinated till April. In April there was a recovery, and basically from June to October the market has been kind of sideways but there was a big impact in November.

Remember back then we didn’t have that much crypto adoption, this is a very big difference and we also didn’t have our countries in an unrecognized bankruptcy status.

What could happen in the most bearish scenario?

Remember there may be a lot of different outcomes and all of it is a game of probabilities. However we rate this scenario by 15% of probability.

If you observe charts of BTC/USDT – there is almost no support between 20,000 and 30,000 USD. There is only one support area located around 30 K. The reason is because Bitcoin rose very quickly from 20 K to 30 K in matter of some days.

So in case if there were any other possible shockwave in June. Bitcoin will likely test the support located around 20,000 USD. If the support fails, then we have another big support level located around 14,000 USD.

We personally don’t see that impossible that Bitcoin may reach levels between 14,000 and 20,000 USD at certain point of June. Of course there may be a point where a lot of people despite the fear will buy the dip and may return the market to 30,000 USD, all of this can happen. Remember nothing is impossible.

The possible shockwaves in this market may happen only for few months, maybe it can last up to September and that’s it.

The shockwaves and pull backs may be stronger than 3 years ago and may occur in much faster mode rather than in 10 months like in 2018.

Basically Bitcoin may touch bottom between 8,000 USD and 14,000 USD in the second part of this year.  In the most bearish scenario, the king of cryptos may go back to 4,000 USD.

Ethereum could depreciate much more than Bitcoin itself because that’s the ETH’s historic behavior, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see ETH between 300 – 500 USD in few months.

And Cardano may go down to 0.1 USD.

I want to emphasize here that this is only one outcome, its likelihood maybe around 15% but it still exists. I

We cannot ever affirm that this will happen this or that way because no one really knows how the market would answer.

Remember this is like the question before you invest:

What is the best that can happen to me and what is the worst.

Long term Bull run

Despite all of what I stated here, I am strongly convinced that Bitcoin, ETH and other alts will follow the path of strong long term bull run during the first part of 2020’s, until the year 2028.

Cryptocurrencies solve a lot of big issues for many holders and it’s also a way how to protect your income on the long run.

Regarding to ETH, I think it’s a great cryptocurrency and a lot of amazing innovation has been born in ERC-20 community; however the key challenge for ETH will be if they are able to tackle the issue of high ETH gas fees. Probably for many people it is not a big deal, but for many small holders it brings a sense of being ripped and on marketing level it shall be a strong concern in our opinion.

If market will keep on accepting those fees or if they do something really about it, then ETH will keep on being cryptocurrency No. 2, however I think that it’s quite probable that ETH will be replaced by other cryptocurrency from 2023 from that position.

I also think that new cryptocurrencies may get into TOP 10 and this trend has been confirmed at the end of 2020. So some will get in, and some will also get out. And remember volatility that's the beauty of the crypto market and there are still a lot of opportunities to earn a lot of profit even in this market.