Trying to untangle what's going on in web3 markets

The web3 market is a mess.

There’s enough going on that it will take us a moment to unpack the situation this morning, but leading indicators of sentiment in the blockchain ecosystem are sufficiently nasty to set the stage: Bitcoin is off around 13% in the last 24 hours to $23,436; ETH is off around 15% over the same time frame to $1,219; Solana’s token is off approximately 15% in the last day to $26.75.

The three tokens are down roughly 26%, 36% and 39%, respectively, over the last week.

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The biggest driver of concern this morning appears to be a crisis at Celsius Networks, which raised a huge chunk of venture capital last year, and today halted withdrawals after its token crashed.

This doesn’t mean that there is no money flowing in the startup world — even some less tech-focused ideas are busy raising big checks, as TechCrunch noted earlier today. But what’s going on in the blockchain domain? Let’s take a minute to explore that question from a few angles.

What the heck is going on?

While I am not the TechCrunch+ crypto expert — that mantle belongs to recent hire Jacquelyn Melinek — I have put together a list of issues that are currently tripping up the web3 market, which is inclusive of everything from cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance to non-fungible tokens. They are, loosely: