As the crypto bear market rages on, investors have had to deal with multiple exchanges and platforms limiting/blocking withdrawals due to “extreme market conditions.” 

This is why we have reached out to Adam O’Neill, CMO at Bitrue. In this interview, O’Neill gives us a rundown of what has led to these limited withdrawals and what crypto exchanges can do to survive the bear market.

Bitcoinist: Can you give us a rundown of what Bitrue is and what it is you do at the company?

Adam O’Neill: Bitrue is an all-in-one cryptocurrency platform, it focuses on the interests of individual users. Essentially our mission is to provide people worldwide with viable options to build up their wealth, an opportunity that’s become closed off within the traditional financial systems.

Related Reading | NFTs Enter A New Era As Solana Closes The Gap With Ethereum

As the Chief Marketing Officer at Bitrue, I oversee all our events and communications with users. Alongside my team, we launch three or four new events every day, be it new yield farming options presented to our users, some meaty analyses of coin trends, or a bunch of other content designed to give more context and information. On top of that, we hold AMA sessions with the founders of coin projects

Bitcoinist: The bear market has ravaged the space recently. What are Bitrue and other exchanges doing to survive such market conditions?

Adam O’Neill: The key to survival in a bear market is preparation. For anyone in the crypto industry for a while, we now know that the markets go through periods of prolonged growth followed by sharp retractions, generally following the price trend of BTC. We’ve had good growth since 2020 or so. Still, only a fool can expect it to last forever. At Bitrue, we’ve been careful not to overextend ourselves, we minimize our exposure to risky debt and other factors that have killed off some of the big names in the last few months.

Total market cap falls below $900 billion | Source: Crypto Total Market Cap on TradingView.com

Beyond that, the key to survival right now lies in business fundamentals. You listen to your customers and provide them with services of genuine value. For example, we’ve identified stablecoins and meme coins as the two most significant areas of customer interest, so we’re offering attractive investment rates on both.

Bitcoinist: We have seen a lot of platforms and exchanges limiting withdrawals. What do you think this means for the future of crypto?

Adam O’Neill: It’s a very bad look for an industry that supposedly prides itself on decentralization and breaking away from the traditional financial systems. Ultimately, I don’t believe this will have a long-term effect on the industry, though. 

Related Reading | The Infamous Cyclicality Of Bitcoin Mining: What Causes This?

Bitcoinist: What factors lead these platforms to stop/limit withdrawals of some cryptocurrencies?

Adam O’Neill: What is happening with these exchanges right now is essentially a bank run. Banks operate on a fractional reserve process wherein they only keep a portion of the debts they owe to their customers as liquid assets (with the rest going to things like real estate and other illiquid investments that benefit the bank). If customers suddenly start to withdraw a lot of cash, the bank cannot find cash back for their customers. The same thing is happening in crypto right now.

While we are seeing more people returning to the old-school mentality of “not your keys, not your crypto” and opting to keep their assets in their own private wallets. 

Bitcoinist: What is the opinion of the Bitrue team on how exchanges should behave during the crisis?

Adam O’Neill: Exchanges are big businesses now, and they have many ways to entice users to come back to them via credit card cashback, staking options, convenience, etc.

When a crisis occurs and snap decisions are made for millions of dollars, many people lose sight of the human element. There’s no such thing as a small or large amount of cash because different amounts have different significance to different people. $100 may be nothing to one person, but to another, a $100 loss may mean that they go to bed hungry that night. If a crisis occurs, an exchange should think about minimizing the overall hardship their user base may suffer. It’s not just about protecting value for stockholders.

Of course, if a business wants to be taken seriously, it should also be doing everything that it can to avoid entering into a crisis in the first place. Some things may be unavoidable, such as natural disasters. Still, suppose we can attribute the blame for an event directly to the business itself (e.g., overexposure to risk). In that case, the business should absorb as much of the loss as possible, minimizing the effect on the customers.

Related Reading | DeFi Protocols At Higher Risk Of Exploit During The Bear Market, Here’s Why

Bitcoinist: What are the possible consequences for the crypto market, and would it ever recover?

Adam O’Neill: The markets operate on cycles, and while it can be challenging to be optimistic during the absolute bottom, we can look towards history for guidance towards the future. 

Bitcoinist: Do you believe cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum will ever reclaim their all-time high? Will the crypto market cap rise above $3 trillion again?

Adam O’Neill: How many times have we seen Bitcoin crash, and how many times has it been declared dead by the media? And yet each time, it reaches a new ATH a couple of months or years later. What evidence is there to say that this cycle has been broken?

Featured image from TIME, charts from TradingView.com

Follow Best Owie on Twitter for market insights, updates, and the occasional funny tweet…