The bear markets are for building, says Fireblock’s CEO

The cryptocurrency space has been in a bear market for the past few months, with prices down by more than 50%.

Fireblock’s Co-Founder and CEO, Michael Shaulov, has revealed in a recent interview that the bear market is for building.

When asked about his thoughts on the bear market, Shaulov said it gives developers the opportunity to build. However, he added that the activities within the broader market are affecting Fireblock’s activities. He said;

“The last set of incidents – both from Luna and as of recent – the entire deleveraging in the market from Celsius, Three Arrows Capital, and so on, is definitely impacting our client base and the continuous expansion of the market.”

Fireblocks is a leading provider of custody infrastructure solutions within the cryptocurrency ecosystem. The company has been around since 2018 and raised $550 million in January to reach an $8 billion valuation. 

However, Shaulov said people told him their idea was dumb and stupid when they started the company. He said;

“A really funny story I have is that when we actually started, people were telling me that the idea was dumb and stupid. They said people will continue using cold storage, and why do we even bother focusing on the hot storage problem or the transfer problem.”

The co-founder said he didn’t expect the company to grow as much as it did over the past four years. Shaulov added that the growth recorded over the past 18 months was beyond their expectation. 

According to the CEO, Fireblock has managed to build a product with a unique product-market-fit for where the market was heading and is heading. He added that the company has grown from 10 people to around 500 staff over the past few years. Shaulov said;

“It’s not like we were expecting this type of growth, but we are happy that we’re able to deliver something that’s valuable.”

The CEO added that the biggest challenge within the cryptocurrency space is to build products with real-world use cases. He concluded that;

“I think that the main challenge right now, and it’s probably the most timely challenge, given everything that is going on in the industry in the last couple of weeks is to really find and empower the real-world use cases. As we all know, outside of Bitcoin, the value of Ethereum or Solana is the question of how this will actually be used for real-world use cases – will it be used for payments? Will it be used for tokenized assets?”