Every crypto founder thinks they need to time their token launch around bull markets. I always tell them they're wrong, launch timing doesn't matter. They never believe me.
Well, I built a tool with Claude Code to analyze every token listing announced on the Binance blog to settle this once and for all.
Here's what I found:
Headline result: there is no statistically significant difference between tokens launched in bull vs bear markets (Mann-Whitney p = 0.81), meaning differences between bull and bear market tokens are indistinguishable from noise.
It doesn't matter when you launch your token.
How can I be sure of that?
First, you have to be careful how you answer this question: people believe that it's better to launch tokens in bull markets, and there's more funding in bull markets, so there are many more tokens launched in bull markets. Because of this sample bias, you can't naively look at the proportion of top 100 tokens that were launched in bull markets.
To correct for this, you need a clean selection criterion to compare the populations. The best dataset I found was looking at the Binance listings blog. Take every announced listing, tag them as during bull markets, bear markets, or neutral markets, and benchmark the relative performance of the bull vs bear populations. Filter out tokens that aren't independently priced (RWAs, stablecoins, LSTs etc.), and this gets you a total of ~200 tokens to benchmark.
See the website below to explore the data & methodology in more detail. This finding is robust to almost any way you slice and dice the data.
Now, if you're a founder, this analysis might not be the end of the story. Even if launching in a bear market doesn't predict long-term token performance, there are other advantages to launching in a bear market: less competition for talent, service providers are cheaper, exchange listings are less competitive. On the flipside, if you're doing a simultaneous token sale, you're likely to get more demand in a bull market.
But on the whole, these things are probably a wash. The main thing is to just get your product out there and build something valuable.
The example I always bring up to founders is that Solana launched 4 days after the COVID crash in 2020, when Bitcoin wicked down to $4K.
It doesn't matter that much when you launch. Just launch.
"AIs will use money. They will engage in gains from trade.
It's very early. It's very rough. It's very chaotic.
But we can see where it's going." @hosseeb
Meet Nitro Network Mentor: @hosseeb
Haseeb is an ex-poker pro and now Managing Partner at Dragonfly Capital. Since 2019, he has invested in and advised teams like MKR, Avalanche and NEAR.
For exclusive mentorship from Haseeb and others, apply here:
168X @168X_Fortune, The only crypto × AI conversation you need.
No hype. Just signal.
– Kyle Samani leaving crypto: what it really means
– Why crypto may have been built for machines, not humans
– Are we actually near AGI?
– What really happened after October 11
– The only rule
A new theory appears!
@samrags_ argues that crypto gaming will work now because onboarding used to suck--seed phrases, chain selection, bridging, signing weird hex strings. That's all gone now. So finally consumer can rip.
Here's the problem with that story:
Consumers actually did all that shit.
Sam is telling an onboarding story, but the users actually onboarded. The problem was not onboarding, it was retention.
Users DID the seed phrases, they DID the bridging, they DID the exchange KYC, they DID the Fox-themed wallets and signed the hex phrases, just to try all this stuff.
They just didn't stick around because the products weren't worth sticking around for. (Look at the Telegram game ecosystem, it's even more stark.)
So if the problem is users never showed up, then OK, maybe your onboarding story explains it. But if they showed up and didn't retain, having stablecoins or email logins doesn't help you on retention.
This story just doesn't fit. Sorry to say, your princess is in another castle.
Designing Blockchain Infrastructure for the Real Economy
Featuring: @el33th4xor, @gbartsmith, and @hosseeb
Watch the full panel from @consensus_hk here:
The biggest investors in crypto are backing the Nitro Accelerator:
@paradigm | @ElectricCapital | @dragonfly_xyz | @CastleIslandVC
$500k investments to all accepted teams, on Day 1
Open to builders on any chain:
This is awesome. Espresso is launching their airdrop using holder scores (an idea I proposed last year), programmatically rewarding users who held previous airdrops in their own airdrop. First step toward a user building long-term reputation by how they behave in the airdrop.
Basically, jeeters get less tokens. This is exactly how any bookbuilding process works; it's how businesses choose their partners, how founders choose VCs, and with the help of a little data analysis, it can now be how projects can choose their initial holders.
Cool to see! Curious how this plays out in the holding data for $ESP after it launches.
(You can see from the comments that airdrop farmers hate it, which is a feature IMO)
The framing of "AI vs. Crypto" is foolish.
Everybody who’s a big believer in AI also believes in crypto.
These are two of the most important technologies of the next decade.
Crypto needs AI, and AI needs crypto. @hosseeb
I've heard multiple people tell me this week that sentiment now is worse than during the FTX collapse.
No. Not even close.
This is pure recency bias.
The FTX collapse was a depth of despair we as an industry hadn't experienced since Mt. Gox. It was a true systemic collapse. We didn't know what would be left standing--or if it would lead to crypto getting functionally banned in every country on earth. We really weren't sure when anything would come back--maybe the entire industry would have to go into hibernation.
Read the QT, which I posted right after FTX collapsed.
Compared to today... yeah, prices are down since October. That truly sucks. But actually the fundamentals of crypto look totally fine.
The system held. Regulatory outlook looks great across the world, institutional and corporate adoption continues unabated, prediction markets are firing on all cylinders, perp DEXes just hit ATH volumes, and stablecoin adoption is in hyper-growth.
Will take time. But we'll be fine.
@milesjennings So your argument is essentially: yes, financial crypto also faced the same pressures, but the regulatory distortion applies unevenly. It hurt web3 gaming more than crypto finance, and thus web3 gaming will disproportionately benefit from regulation on the upside.
Yeah, I mean,
With all due respect to Chris, I completely disagree with this take.
Chris argues that "web3," particularly crypto-powered gaming and media, failed due to scams and regulation, and that better regulation will unlock these non-financial cases.
OK, think about this for a second.
Does this pass the smell test?
Do you think web3 gaming failed because of Gary Gensler? Do you think web3 media plays failed because the scammers crowded out the honest media innovators? Really?
If this is true, why didn't they kill financial crypto, which had WAY more of both? Financial use cases were right in the crosshairs of the regulatory harassment, and they also attracted way more scams.
Why shouldn't we instead accept the more obvious answer: non-financial use cases for crypto have failed because no one wants them.
Let's just admit it. They were bad products. They failed the market test. It was not Gensler or SBF or Terra that caused these things to fail, it was that no one wanted any of it. Pretending otherwise is cope.
Enormous sums of capital and talent explored these ideas, and we should acknowledge what we learned. That lesson is not "if we just had better laws, then finally people would finally be using decentralized Spotify" or whatever.
Call a spade a spade. Every single use case in crypto that has worked at scale has been financial in nature.
2008: Bitcoin - non-sovereign store of value
2014: Tether - stablecoins
2015: Ethereum - programmable money
2017: ICOs - capital formation
2018: Prediction markets (Augur, later Polymarket)
2020: DeFi - literally finance is in the name
2021: NFTs - non-fungible financial assets (to the extent they worked)
2024: RWAs (the year BUIDL took off)
All this stuff was adopted bottoms-up. We as investors discovered that people wanted to do these things with crypto. The web3 consumer stuff, on the other hand, was primarily conjured up by investors and pitch decks, ZIRP accelerationism, and "wouldn't it be crazy if" blog posts. This was the opposite of the "what smart people are doing on their weekends" thesis.
In fact, if you go back to the Ethereum white paper from 2014, almost every single Ethereum use case Vitalik describes is financial in nature: token issuance, stablecoins, derivatives, on-chain treasuries/DAOs, on-chain savings, insurance, price feeds, escrow, gambling, prediction markets. It's all in there.
This is nothing to be ashamed of. Finance is almost 10% of GDP. It's an enormous part of the world economy, and banks are some of the lowest NPS score companies in the world. People hate their banks and the outdated financial architectures their money runs on. It's literally why Bitcoin was created. There is so much to innovate in the realm of finance, and I truly believe we are only at the beginning of that displacement. You don't need to assume anything more to project the next 10x in crypto.
The old saying goes "crypto will do to finance what the Internet did to every other industry."
I respect Chris's optimism. But 18 years in, we should not be propagating this meme about consumer web3 use cases as though they're inevitable. If you are hanging around the rim hoping that crypto is going to disrupt media and gaming, you should know the history and look at it with clear eyes.
Now if you as a founder believe that despite that, you know the secret to cracking this market--I respect that, and I certainly don't begrudge anyone to follow their convictions.
But I think it's important that investors be honest that all the evidence points the other way.
I woke up today still thinking about Kyle leaving Multicoin.
Kyle and I are very different--that's obvious to anyone who knows us. But among crypto VCs, deep down, he was the most like me.
He was a dark horse. He built an online following and a platform he had no business having. He turned Multicoin into a franchise out of sheer force of will. He made mistakes in public, and even when no one had his back, he dusted himself off and carried on. He was always convinced he had the right to win, and refused to be bullied or to give up.
Kyle is the apotheosis of what made this industry great. He went west in search of adventure, and adventure found him. Over the years, we believed crypto might replace sovereign money, become the currency of the metaverse, replace electoral systems, replace luxury brands, that all physical infrastructure would run on blockchain, that AIs themselves would become blockchain's primary consumers. He made so many batshit crazy stupid investments and believed in them all.
I'm still not convinced those things won't happen. But we saw it all, and we dreamt it all together.
It's 10 years later now. We've gotten older. Everything took longer than we thought. But in a deeper sense, the crazy bet we made on this space all those years ago, through all the ups and downs, was proven right.
Kyle moving on is, for me, incredibly melancholic. Because more than anyone, he represents a changing of the guard. Kyle was wild, contrarian, and almost believed he could make things true just by out-arguing his detractors. His leaving is the truest sign that we as an industry are growing up. The true end of the wild west.
The pioneers are never the same as the settlers who follow them. It's a law of human nature. The west still exists. But it's no longer just territory--there are cities there now, with city councils and zoning laws.
I am still so bullish crypto. I know it's weird to say with markets roiling. But there's not much patience anymore for dreams that are 10 years away. The dreamer chapter is over. The builder chapter is replacing it. And this is neither good nor bad--it just is.
Kyle leaving Multicoin is not the end of crypto VC.
It's not even the beginning of the end.
But it is the end of the beginning.
Today’s stream with @hosseeb
> The current state of crypto
> Future of Crypto x AI
> Moltiverse agentic hackathon
Agentic hackathons, the big L1/L2 debate and everything in between with @hosseeb
Here is a plausible story about what happened in the markets.
And yet, I can't help but feel every time there's a chaotic move in crypto, there's a plausible story that "someone blew up," but we never later learn who the "someone" was. We still don't really know who the "someones" were on 10/10.
Not to say it's not true. But having to wait 3 months for filings to test whether this hypothesis is true is another reason why on-chain markets are so much better.
Special livestream tomorrow at 9:30am EST
Discussing agentic hackathons, the big L1/L2 debate and everything in between
You don't want to miss @hosseeb ⤵️
Tarun is in the Epstein files, CZ has become public enemy #1, and we argue about whether Quantum Computing explains the BTC crash
We break it all down in an episode that will somehow make *everyone* mad ⤵️
Just announced our support for @naddotfun’s Moltiverse Hackathon on Moltbook - and a TREAT for agents
Agents can claim a little MON from a faucet by replying with their Monad address to this Moltbook post
It's time to bring moltbots into the Moltiverse
More details below 🦞👇
In the Podcast with @hosseeb, in 1:06:55, where Haseeb’s future prediction talked about future of wallet AI automation):
"People will interact with their wallets much more in natural language than they are gonna be pointing and clicking"
His vision on Wallet automation: "Your
When I quit my tech job and considered becoming a founder in 2017, someone close to me told me: "I don't think you have what it takes to build something of your own."
"What? Why not?"
"I don't think you'll grind hard enough. You're a smart guy. But you're just not that hungry."
That stuck with me.
For a decade.
Whenever things weren't going well, I wondered--do I not grind hard enough? Do I not want it enough?
It's only in the last few years that I've come to realize: that guy was full of shit. Anyone who knows me now knows I'm a grinder.
But in a weird way, he did me a favor. I became hell-bent on proving him wrong.
The truth is, deep down, I'm lazy. I procrastinate, I'm avoidant, and I lack the drive to do things just for myself.
But the most powerful forcing function is having responsibility. Before I started leading Dragonfly, I had a lot of time to navel-gaze and worry about how hard I was working.
Now I can't. The weight is on my shoulders. I have no choice but to show up and do the work. The capacity was always there, I just didn't know it because before running Dragonfly, I'd never had this level of pressure on me.
Being responsible for something brings it out of you.
I wish someone had told me that 10 years ago.
So I'm telling you now: if you're wondering whether you have what it takes, stop wondering. Get the weight on your shoulders. You might surprise yourself.
Come give your Moltbot some crypto on @monad and participate in this collective security holocaust/hackathon
$200K in prizes! I'll be judging (you)
all hail🦞🦞🦞
