Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin Predicts Another Crypto Winter Will Benefit the Crypto Landscape

The broader crypto market continues to remain choppy and volatile since the beginning of 2022. The recent market corrections has pushed analysts to believe that we might be staring at a new ‘crypto winter’, similar to the one seen in 2018.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin is welcoming the crypto winter and believes that it might be actually beneficial to the crypto universe. In an interview with Bloomberg, the 28-year old crypto billionaire said: “The winters are the time when a lot of those applications fall away and you can see which projects are actually long-term sustainable, like both in their models and in their teams and their people”.

As said, the crypto price have been on a decline since November 2021. Since November, the Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto Index is down 45% from its all-time high. Similarly, the top two cryptocurrencies Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) have corrected 40% each.

Buterin further added that a bearish market is usually welcoming for long-term investors who can build up new positions in this market correction. He added: “The people who are deep into crypto, and especially building things, a lot of them welcome a bear market. They welcome the bear market because when there are these long periods of prices moving up by huge amounts like it does -- it does obviously make a lot of people happy -- but it does also tend to invite a lot of very short-term speculative attention.”

Buterin added that he’s “surprised” the way the market has moved over the last year. He further added that he isn’t sure whether the crypto market has entered another winter or it’s just mirroring some volatility in the broader market.

Earlier this month, he added: “It does feel like the crypto markets kind of flip the switch from being this niche group that’s controlled by a very niche group of participants and it’s fairly disconnected to traditional markets into something that behaves more and more like it is part of the mainstream financial markets”.

Buterin also believes that a crypto winter can help in improving the technology in the crypto landscape. Last month in January, the Ethereum co-founder had warned the risks associated with cross-blockchain bridges. Warmhole, one of the most-popular cross-chain bridges between Ethereum and Solana was hacked for over $300 million.

The current areas of focus for Ethereum developers is improving the network scalability. Ethereum has been facing major issues with respect to network congestions and high gas fee.

Buterin added: “When everyone is again trying to use blockchains, We don’t want them to discover yet again that no, actually, there isn’t enough space on the chain for everyone.”