The market and the machine.

Attention can run ahead of understanding.

In 2017, rising prices and a wave of token fundraising brought many new participants into crypto. An initial coin offering, or ICO, sold newly issued tokens to raise funds. A white paper and an easy purchase page could make a very early proposal feel like an established business.

The subsequent downturn is often called a crypto winter. Prices fell, funding became harder and many projects disappeared. Some teams continued building, but surviving a quiet period did not prove a project’s quality.

In March 2020, Bitcoin sold off during the wider financial shock around the pandemic. This is a useful counterexample to the idea that it must rise whenever traditional markets become frightened.

Market history contains several severe drawdowns. A drawdown measures the fall from a prior peak. Past recoveries show what happened in those episodes; they are not a contract promising another recovery.

A new doorway is not a new protocol.

Corporate treasury purchases, payment-company products and exchange listings brought new ways to gain exposure during the following years. A familiar institution can make access easier. It can also add its own custody, fee and operational arrangements.

El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021. Its framework changed later: the 2025 IMF-supported program included voluntary private-sector acceptance and reduced public-sector involvement. A policy headline should always travel with its date.

These developments concern adoption and access. They do not make signatures stronger, remove price volatility or tell every household what to do. Familiarity should invite inspection, not end it.

The failures of 2022 had different mechanisms.

Terra’s UST stablecoin and its linked LUNA token collapsed in May 2022. The design depended on incentives and conversions maintaining a price relationship; those mechanisms did not preserve the peg during the crisis.

The failures and distress of lenders and trading firms followed. Three Arrows Capital, Celsius, Voyager and later BlockFi were not interchangeable with a base blockchain. Leverage, liquidity, asset exposure and custody arrangements mattered.

FTX collapsed in November 2022. Customer assets had been misused, including for its affiliated trading firm. The criminal case established fraud. That is more precise than saying every project that fell was fraudulent or that every failure had the same cause.

The shared lesson is to trace the promise. A stable price promise, a withdrawal promise and a profit promise can depend on different assets and different people. A broad market decline can expose several weaknesses at once.

Own the coin, or hold a product linked to it?

In January 2024, the US SEC approved the listing and trading of a group of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded products. These securities trade through brokerage systems. Regulatory approval of their listing did not endorse Bitcoin or promise safe returns.

A spot product holds bitcoin through a custody arrangement. Investors usually own shares rather than the ability to spend the underlying bitcoin from their own wallet. A futures product gains exposure through contracts; its structure and costs differ.

When new spot-product shares are created or redeemed, the underlying holdings can change. But an ordinary trade of an existing share can simply transfer that share between investors. It does not necessarily cause a matching new bitcoin purchase.

The April 2024 halving was a separate protocol-schedule event. A new investment wrapper changes access; a halving changes permitted issuance. Neither mechanically determines price.

The idea to keep

Keep three histories beside each other: what the network did, what businesses promised, and what the market paid. Understanding one does not excuse ignoring the other two.