This bear market is not IOTA’s first rodeo.
The “blockchainless blockchain” is no spring chicken in the cryptocurrency world, old and wise enough to draw upon its last crypto winter experience following the euphoria of 2017.
This week on the CoinJournal podcast, I chatted with IOTA’s Christian Saur about everything IOTA, as well as the cryptocurrency market at large.
There was a lot to discuss. Investors may remember IOTA’s massive surge in 2017, and it was one of the few tokens to survive the subsequent bear market yet not eclipse those highs in the most recent bull market during COVID.
But more than anything, this just highlights how rampant the speculation was back then, with Christian making some interesting points about the lack of utility and IOTA’s significant development since then – akin to what we have seen with a lot of the bigger cryptocurrencies.
And DeFi – IOTA is now making real moves to ramp up its presence in the space. One of the things I always stress to people in my analysis is the fact that during the recent contagion that rippled through the crypto markets, DeFi functioned exactly as planned. The bad actors like Celsius, Three Arrows Capital and others were all CeFi companies.
DeFi did exactly as it promised to do – liquidations happened right on schedule, just like they were coded to, and the blockchain didn’t lie. Nothing failed; nothing broke. Sure, maybe Terra can be counted as DeFi, but that was via a flawed model rather than any issues with DeFi itself. We chat about these events and how DeFi reacted too.
It was fun to chat with a coin that has been around for so long, and seen all this before. Does that give investors extra security of mind?
Last month, the Shimmer network was released, likened by Christian as a sort of IOTA version of “what Kusama is to Polkadot”. It was nice hearing about a fair launch too, with no big chunk of tokens going to insiders, unlike a lot of the projects of recent times.
We focussed on what it’s like launching such a big upgrade amid a bear market devoid of almost any bullish sentiment. We also go into the ins and outs of what exactly it is, and what it means for IOTA going forward.
Finally, it’s always nice hearing about personal journeys into crypto. Christian tells me how he first came across IOTA, and he decided to go all-in, jumping deep down the crypto rabbit hole.
This is just a flavour though – the full podcast can be caught at the links below.