​The FTX deal is off, markets are crashing, things are rough. Let's take stock.

Alright, first off - who's performing this Voodoo??

We've been signing off each one of these Binance x FTX articles (here, here, here) with something along the lines of 'let's hope X doesn't happen.'

We're going to stop doing that from now on.

Because every time we have, the bad thing has ended up happening. Yesterday it was:

"Let's all join hands, light some candles, murmur an incantation or two, and pray to our respective gods that Binance like what they see [under FTX's hood]."

Well, they didn't - Binance have since pulled out of the acquisition deal, and fear is spreading across the crypto market.

Bitcoin (BTC) is down ~20% on the week, Ethereum (ETH) is down ~25%, and Solana (oooft, SOL!) - it's down ~55%. The entire market is down $200B at the time of writing.

It sucks, and it can hurt (a lot!). If you're feeling it, know that you're not alone.

Now that we've all acknowledged the pain, let's balance our perspectives...

Every time there's an event like this (one large enough to drag down the entire market) - like the recent collapse of FTX, or Luna's nose dive earlier in the year - it's important to ask two questions about the projects we follow:

Has anything fundamentally changed in [COIN NAME]? And is this likely to continue?

If the answer is 'no' to each, the long term horizon becomes a little less gloomy.

For example:

When Luna collapsed, the team behind the project sold a BUNCH of Bitcoin, and put the profits back into Luna, to prop up the project.

It didn't work - and as a bi-product, the sell pressure put on Bitcoin crashed the BTC price.

Had anything fundamentally changed in Bitcoin? No, the cause of the price change came from outside the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Was this likely to continue? Also no. The Luna Foundation Guard only had so much BTC to sell, so its effects, while sharp - were also going to be short.

In the moment, it sucked. But knowing there was a good chance the effects were going to be short lived, helped.

In the case of the FTT token - it's looking like it won't recover.

...but what does that have to do with the rest of the market, on say, a ten year time horizon? Probably very little.

Is this guaranteed? Definitely not.

Is there a chance we could be eating our words at some point? Ab-so-lutely.

What does the future hold? Couldn't tell you.

Our point is this:

When it feels like the sky is falling, it helps to zoom out and balance your perspective - because the best & worst outcomes rarely come to pass.

(It usually falls somewhere in the middle).

Let's hope that...wait, no - we're not doing that anymore.

End of article.