We are no doubt in an emotional “dark place”. With the price of ETH (and many other crypto assets) crashing, the joke “How to become a crypto millionaire — start as a crypto billionaire” doesn’t sound all that funny for most of us anymore.

Just look at the chart below. It shows what we call “social volume” for the topic “capitulation”.

Search results from typical cryptocurrency-related sources

Along with that, we are seeing an emerging depression around crypto communities as people start looking for “those to be blamed” for the crash. A major flash point for the past few days has been “ICO projects are crashing the price by dumping their ETH funds”. Several news sources have covered this topic using data from SANbase Dashboards closed beta.

Yet, there’s still more to be understood from what looks like “ETH spending” activity.

SANbase shows a decent list of projects and their ETH holdings, but there remains a large number of projects that have yet to disclose their holdings. Therefore, we cannot assume that “projects dumping ETH” is the real, or sole, reason for the current crash. What’s happening now is just natural market behaviour. When a market goes beyond “reasonable” valuations on the way up …. so it must feel equally “unreasonable” on the way down.

That said, in order to make smarter decisions, we need more information. We have reason to believe that the current crash actually has little to do with the projects selling their ETH — but we need more data to prove it.

Project team members, and anyone in the community with team wallet information, please get in touch with us here so we can continue to grow our open database.

While project ETH holdings is just one piece of the puzzle, it’s an important one. Once the communities… be it contributors or speculators…. have access to this data, they will be able to act in a more informed way, which should have a positive (and calming) influence on the market.

More transparency will help everyone. We won’t solve all the problems, but we will at least be one step closer to bringing much needed clarity to this crypto space together. And who knows, perhaps by seeing the data it will become clear that this narrative around “ETH dumping” may not be the reason for the crash after all. Just by comparing the daily trading volumes and “ETH sold by projects” we should be able to see it ;)

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