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- OGs love a crypto winter because genuine fans like them can do without the excess hype, a top Coinbase exec said.
- “Everybody who kind of disproportionately benefits from crypto tends to just ride it out on the long term,” Emilie Choi said.
- Bitcoin is down 30% from its peak of near $69,000 about a month ago, but is up 67% in the year to date.
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Real crypto believers celebrate a “crypto winter” because it filters out the skeptics, according to top Coinbase executive Emilie Choi.
That’s a period when digital assets linger at uncharacteristically low prices, coming after a recent bullish run higher.
“The OGs in the space absolutely love the winters. Like, Brian Armstrong loves a winter,” Choi told Bloomberg in an interview Wednesday, referring to the boss of crypto exchange Coinbase, where she is chief operating officer.
“And the reason that they love the winters is frankly the fakers get out of the space, the builders keep building. They can focus without all the crazy hype around the fakers,” she added.
Crypto investors shouldn’t expect to score quick gains, but should be patient, according to Choi.
“Everybody who kind of disproportionately benefits from crypto tends to just ride it out on the long term and be holders throughout the ups and downs,” she said. “It’s definitely not for the faint of heart.”
“It’s just one of those things where you have to truly believe in the idea that long term, and if you stick through it, it’s great,” she added.
“If you’re a short-term investor, it’s probably not a great thing.”
Leading cryptocurrency bitcoin hit its all-time high of almost $69,000 in November, having doubled in price in the months since July. It’s now down almost 30% from that record, and is trading around $48,520. But the token is still up 67% for the year so far.
Meanwhile, second-place ether has tumbled about 20% in the last three months to $4,064. For 2021, though, the coin has risen about 455%.
More recently, crypto prices slid in the days leading up to the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy decision on Wednesday, as investors grappled with the prospect of faster cuts to stimulus and sooner interest-rate hikes. Many view bitcoin as a hedge against inflation, which the Fed is trying to tackle.
Kraken CEO Jesse Powell recently said a crypto winter is now “possible,” but that it would be a buying opportunity.
In the Bloomberg interview, Choi also explained the reason behind Coinbase’s platform displaying astronomically-high cryptocurrency prices Tuesday. Popular data provider CoinMarketCap first began displaying the inaccurate prices, leading many users to momentarily think they’d scored enormous gains.
“We are dependent upon another provider CoinMarketCap for data. And so there was a glitch,” Choi said. “It didn’t actually cause anything, other than the superficial thing that you saw with the pricing.”
The crypto exec said such an incident is “indicative of an emerging industry,” and Coinbase is “still building out infrastructure to make sure that this stuff scales in the right way.”