The bull market may have quietly begun, so how far is it from the peak this time? And how long will it last?

"The market is always born in despair, grows in half-belief and half-doubt, matures in anticipation, and perishes in hope."

Unfortunately, most newcomers don’t know this sentence, or even if they know it, they probably won’t be able to understand this sentence from the bottom of their hearts before they have personally experienced these stages and completely gone through a bull and bear cycle, let alone do anything according to this sentence.

In the past two months, whether it is media such as Baihua Blockchain or some big Vs or KOLs in the industry, the question that is probably asked most often is "When will the bull market come?"

However, this question is actually very simple to answer. Comparing it with the above sentence, you can take out the K-line charts of Bitcoin and some other currencies in the past few months, and answer yourself, when will the bull market come?

01 Born in despair - the deepest despair in history

In the circle, have you ever seen a more terrifying market crash than the 312 incident this year, a lower greed index, a faster wealth shrinkage, and a more desperate market sentiment?

Anyway, I haven't seen it.

If the market is compared to a spring, bouncing back and forth between the upper and lower sections, then 312 can be said to be the lowest point in history when the spring was compressed.

Just like the yin and yang sides of all things, extreme despair gives birth to extreme hope.

No doubt, you open the candlestick chart and suddenly find that in 4 months, even Bitcoin has almost tripled. Excellent altcoins, especially Defi-related ones, have seen 5-10 times growth. It is almost impossible to find a coin that has not doubled in the entire market. If this is put in the stock market, almost no one will doubt what kind of market this is.

However, the most common question we hear is still: When will the bull market come?

02Growing up in half-belief and half-doubt——Being among the cows but not knowing the cow

If you follow this wave of Defi craze, you must have noticed that around May 15, the prices of many Defi-related currencies suddenly began to rise and then never looked back.

Some people say that this is "manipulation by market makers", while others say that this is the entry of big whales. In any case, it is obvious that there is a lot of capital behind it. As for why it is at this time point, I am afraid no one knows. The most logical explanation is that the halving story is over, and the industry needs a new story to continue.

Two weeks after the launch of the DEFi market, Baihua published an article titled "Centralized small platforms continue to "run away", but DEX activity "surged", may there be new dividends?" The article introduced several popular DEXs, especially the leading Dex KNC and BNT with tokens. I was deeply impressed that a reader left a message saying "If this article had been published half a month earlier, I might have been very moved..."

I can understand why this reader said that at the time, because at that time, Bancor mentioned in the article tripled in just half a month from May 15th to June 1st. It seemed that after reading the article, I would most likely consider "taking over".

However, there are two issues that many people tend to overlook.

First, if that article was written half a month ago, when the Defi market was not yet hot, then when you saw it at that time, you probably would not have thought of considering these projects.

Second, I read the article on June 1st, and then I thought about KNC and BNT. What is the profit in more than a month? KNC and BNT have nearly tripled in price compared to June 1st, and now they have doubled by 2.5 times.

You see, starting from June, there have been a lot of media and KOLs writing articles about Defi, Dex, and metaphors, and it’s not just Vernacular Blockchain. It can be said that throughout June, if you consider almost any Defi-related mainstream currency at any point in time, you may have good returns by July. However, you may always be skeptical, thinking that Bitcoin has been trading sideways for 1 or 2 months since it went online at 9,000. Can this be called a bull market?

It is called a bull market only when even garbage can increase tenfold. If this local bull market where only local high-quality projects increase five or ten times is not called a bull market?

Therefore, the bull market is growing slowly amid many people's half-belief and half-doubt...

In this half-belief and half-doubtful growth process, many new things were born, and many users' habits and concepts also changed. Here are a few examples:

1. Many users are familiar with the operation of Metamask and find that they can never go back to Cex . There is no endless KYC and robots. To withdraw coins, you need to enter the email, mobile phone and verification code... One Metamask can be used in all Dex, and you can swap with one click. You don’t need to worry about buying and selling (especially AMM mechanism DEX such as Uniswap and KNC). Even the depth that was criticized before, on many mainstream coins, the ordinary amount of funds will not feel much difference from the slippage of CEX.

2. Many projects choose to launch on Uniswap or Balancer . Although many of these projects are fake and shoddy products, many Defi star projects such as UMA, BZRX, and mStable also choose to launch on DEX, referred to as IDO. However, these DEX projects that adopt the curve auction launch method are all dominated by "scientists" using GAS or scripts due to the weak performance of ETH. They often open at 10 times the price, but everyone finds that no one can grab it. However, it will not last long, and some new DEX projects that have launched have begun to think about and explore fairer ways.

3. Yield Farming——Liquidity mining has become the main theme . Cmpound’s borrowing is mining, Balancer’s market making is mining… Many readers think that this is what we left over from last year, a variant of trading is mining? Yes, that’s right, it’s what we left over, and then they improved it, found a more logical application scenario, and then carried it forward… Of course, as far as I’m concerned, mining like Balancer that provides market making liquidity is beneficial to the entire ecosystem. For example, Compound’s borrowing is mining, where both borrowers and lenders can mine, which is a bit like the trading is mining back then, which completely changes the purpose of borrowing. I don’t know how long it can last.

4. The market is looking for a new stablecoin : From the price increase of several stablecoin projects and the freezing of 6 million USDC, we can clearly feel that the market is looking for a better stablecoin besides USDT and DAI. The most controversial one recently is undoubtedly Ampleforth - AMPL, a stablecoin based on algorithmic reserves and elastic money supply system, which has doubled more than 10 times in just a few days. At first glance, it looks like ZJP, but if you think about it carefully, it is completely at the same level as last year's Fomo3D, using smart contracts to the extreme, which is amazing. Many people even say that from an experimental point of view, this is a currency experiment that can be compared with Bitcoin. Interested friends can search by themselves, and I won't go into details here.

03Maturity in anticipation

We probably haven't reached this stage yet, and are still in the late stages of growth with half-belief and half-doubt.

As described in the previous article about the hot spots in the second half of the year, there will be many new hot spots from the second half of 2020 to 2021, including storage, cross-chain, NFT, DAO, Layer2, the continuation of Defi, and even privacy computing... These new hot spots, big or small, will make this market slowly mature in anticipation . The blockchain industry is originally a place that will attract a steady stream of people and funds as long as there are stories to tell.

On the day of writing this article, BTC and ETH started to rise steadily, and it seems that the market of mainstream currencies is about to start. I think once it starts, we will not be far away from this third stage.

04Destruction in Hope

We all don't like destruction, but the laws of the financial market are eternal and unchanging, and bull and bear markets always alternate.

No one knows when the next destruction will happen, and no one knows why:

Perhaps Defi has proven to still be unable to break out of the circle, and can only be self-satisfied in the cryptocurrency circle, becoming a self-rescue story after the failure of ETH, the world computer;

Maybe a Defi contract that locked up hundreds of millions or billions of dollars was hacked and stolen;

Maybe the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade failed;

Maybe Filecoin is falsified;

Or maybe there is no reason at all, except that many people who made profits in the previous stages cashed out and temporarily left the market.

I hope you will always remind yourself not to get carried away in the bull market and to always be alert to the fourth stage which may come at any time.

05Final words

We often say that the Internet has turned the world into a global village, and social and communication software have made it easier and closer for people to connect with each other.

However, with the emergence of a series of problems such as the release of big data, user portrait analysis, and massive information overload, our lives seem to have been circled into isolated islands, and we know nothing about each other's world.

In the past, when there was no Internet, everyone, regardless of gender, age or status, read newspapers, listened to the radio and watched the news. Everyone had similar channels for obtaining information. If you know it, I probably know it too.

Today, I still remember when I saw the headlines of the hot search list, Xiao Zhan fans reported the AO3 incident, my first reaction was: Who is Xiao Zhan? Then the next thought was: What is AO3?

Our cryptocurrency circle is essentially isolated from the outside world. When we were discussing Bitcoin and Litecoin, people outside the circle had never heard of the word Bitcoin. Now Bitcoin is almost a household name. We are discussing cross-chain, Defi, and Layer2 in the circle. These are undoubtedly incomprehensible to people outside the circle who have only heard of the word Bitcoin.

Even within the circle, for this wave of Defi's local bull market, although we all use WeChat, the WeChat groups for mainstream currencies and contracts have been almost silent for the past two months, while the Defi groups have thousands of chat records a day. The market is so hot that many people feel that there are too many codes for getting rich, and they are anxious about which one to grab.

Having said so much, I just want to say, don't ask when the bull market will come, the bull market has already come, but you may not have caught or sensed the bull head. In recent days, the Russian legislature has approved the legal status of digital assets, the US savings bank has begun to provide cryptocurrency custody services, and China is also clarifying the blockchain standards, hoping to be the first to launch CBDC. These signals all tell you that the wind is coming, and all you have to do is stand at the wind and wait for the wind to come. And remember that the wind will not blow all the time, remember to land~.

What stage do you think the market is in now? Have you made any money in the past few months? Please leave your comments in the comment section.