BlocksInform
There is nothing so natural as a "crypto winter." like any other market, the cryptocurrency market is subject to growth and slowdown cycles. Again, due to its speculative nature and the inherent lack of value behind crypto assets, it is much more sensitive to various economic factors. Each "crypto winter" has been essentially a market bubble collapse, followed by a repeated reduction in crypto values.
More than a year, the price of Bitcoin fell 2.8 times from 46.3 thousand US dollars to 16.5 thousand US dollars. Total coin value tracked by coinmarketcat has dropped 3.5 times from $3 trillion to $850 billion. From May to December 2022, the average value of daily transactions has increased from $131 billion to $57 billion. If that is not enough, the "crypto winter" has been complemented by several dramatic events that have affected the market as a whole.
In May, an algorithmic stablecoin of 18 billion dollars, terrausd, crashed with his counterparty luna. Over the course of a few days, the crypto market lost a quarter of its value. Two months later, the $20 billion Celsius network crypto bank went bankrupt. Later, it became clear that Celsius misled investors and worked as a ponzi plan. Around the same time, capital hedge fund arrows collapsed with a crypto digital lender voyager, which provided the old one with a loan of $664 million.
Finally, in November, users lost billions of dollars when the FTX crypto exchange went bankrupt due to fraud by its founders and top management.
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AppstoreSpy, the mobile application intelligence tool of the market, has analyzed how the "crypto winter" affected applications: the most popular exchanges and portfolios on Android and iOS.
The following results are available.
Non-Custodial Wallets
Popular portfolios that are not privative of freedom follow the same model as cryptocurrency exchanges. On Android, global downloads of , and CoinBase Wallet were reduced by 75%, and Trust Wallet downloads halved. Around 13.5% of METAMASK Android downloads came from the Philippines: this country ranks 2nd in crypto adoption in Chainalysis ratings (ahead of the US, Ukraine, and India). Nearly a quarter of the new facilities of the trusted portfolio application on Android devices comes from Nigeria, one of the world's leading countries in the adoption of cryptocurrency.
For Apple devices, we, the users, are responsible for one-fourth or one-third of the installations. New users from Russia have a share of around 5% for TrustWallet, and 7.5% for MyEtherWallet (MEW). Most centralised exchanges have prohibited or restricted Russian users, forcing them to move to non-custodial portfolios of freedom and decentralized exchanges (DeX).
However, there was an application to take advantage of the winter 2022 "crypto." LEDGER Live, a complementary application for Ledger hardware portfolios, has seen a surge of users after each adverse event in the world of cryptography. On-line general ledger downloads increased by 2% in 2022 over 2021. About 50% of new users came from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Germany.
The comparison of free portfolios and a complementary application for a costly device (starting at $59 for nano-books) can be counterintuitive. All the same, it highlights an important tendency: people move from cryptography trading to holding it for better times.
Crypto Exchanges
Major crypto exchanges (check the rankings from CoinMarketCap) suffered a significant decrease in installs, specifically in North America and Europe. For instance, between November 2021 and November 2022, COINBASE dropped from 2 million installs on Android devices and 1 million installs on to 300k installs from Google Play and App Store. Because cryptocurrencies have become less profitable, retail investors in developed countries have turned to other assets.
During this time, BINANCE and KUCOIN has obtained an influx of users from Turkey, Nigeria, Brazil and other countries affected by high inflation rates. Users from Turkey (65% annual inflation rate) totaled 9.7% new Android installs, and 11.8% new installs for the Binance app, not including the separate Binance TR app). Kucoin has obtained 12.6% of Turkey's new android installations, 6.3% of Nigeria's (21.34% inflation rate), and 6.3% of Brazil's (which has also experienced high inflation rates in recent years). Cryptocurrencies also function as alternative financial instruments that are more profitable.
