Glossary
Crypto Winter
A prolonged bear market in which crypto prices, volumes, and investor interest stay depressed for many months — a shakeout that tests which projects survive without speculative inflows.
A crypto winter is an extended downturn in which digital-asset prices fall sharply and then stay depressed — not for days or weeks, but for months or even years. Trading volume dries up, media attention fades, venture funding slows, and the retail speculators who crowded in during the last rally quietly disappear. The term borrows from the idea of a long, hard season you simply have to wait out.
Two episodes defined the phrase: the 2018–2019 stretch after the 2017 ICO mania, and the 2022–2023 slump that followed the Terra, Celsius, and FTX collapses. What makes a crypto winter useful as a concept is what it exposes. With speculative inflows gone, projects survive on real usage, runway, and working technology rather than hype — so a winter tends to clear out weak tokens and leave builders who keep shipping through the cold.