Web3 Developers Can Thrive In The Bear Market With The Right Support Services

The blockchain and crypto sector is undoubtedly going through difficult times, with the market falling $2 trillion since its November 21 peak. An overwhelming negative sentiment is shrinking the industry’s resources while weekly outflows amount to $102 million.

The Crypto Fear & Greed Index shows that investors remain “fearful” of the current bear market conditions. But history teaches us that this lack of hype and market exuberance actually provides fertile conditions for developing innovative technological solutions.

When the DotCom Bubble burst in the early 2000s, companies like Amazon, e-Bay, Google, Facebook, and Cisco all survived the crash. Indeed, they emerged from the crash stronger because their developers continued building instead of allowing volatile markets and negative sentiment distract them. Similarly, crypto projects like Tron, ChainLink, Polkadot, and EOS, were able to survive the 2017 ICO craze and the crypto winter that followed.

Bear markets have historically filtered out opportunists and stupid capital to make way for real innovators delivering scaleable market solutions and longer-term investor growth.

Nevertheless, bear markets also entail a shortage of capital as investor disappear or sit on the sidelines and liquidity disappears from the market. Only a handful of serious project developers, entrepreneurs, and long-term investors stay back to support each other.

These stakeholders require a space where they can connect, collaborate, and build cutting-edge technologies to sustain themselves and the industry overall. Incubators, launchpads, and accelerators become crucial resources for entrepreneurs, companies, and developers during a bear market.

Incubating Startups, Accelerating Growth

Incubators can be essential to a company’s long-term survival and success. The National Business Incubator Association reports that 87 percent of incubated startups continue to survive after five years—twice the success rate of startups that develop completely on their own. Moreover, 84 percent of incubated companies share the incubator’s community, creating a wide but well-knit network of entrepreneurs, advisors, developers, and investors, however, community support is just one aspect of incubators.

Among the diverse services offered by crypto launchpads, fundraising is one of the most important. Since developers and entrepreneurs usually do not have large amounts of capital available, startups need financial assistance to build their protocols. Venture capitalists and angel investors associated with an incubator provide the much-needed liquidity for early-stage Web3 companies. This funding helps startups focus on development, scaling operations, marketing, and hiring.

In addition to funding, incubators provide the expertise and experience of professionals to mentor startup employees during early stage development. Domain experts act as consultants to project leaders during incubation to build better products that are ready for mass markets. TDeFi, an incubator for DeFi protocols, offers a “Lifetime Advisory Program” for incubated companies. This ensures that protocols continue to get the support and assistance of mentors, even after their official launch.

TDeFi’s CEO Gaurav Dubey explains, “Mentoring comes in varied forms. Apart from ideation, launchpads assist in designing utility-based, growth-oriented tokenomics, which is necessary for attracting investors. A well-networked incubator always finds strategic investors for startups even in a bear market.”

Incubators like TDeFi also provide post-launch assistance to comply with a country’s crypto legislation and follow regulatory best practices. To date, TDeFi has incubated over 40 startups across the DeFi, NFT, gaming, metaverse, infrastructure, and healthcare sectors.

Despite the bear market, blockchain gaming and game-based NFTs have thrived recently, outperforming other crypto-based sectors. The DappRadar-BGA Blockchain Games Report recorded 1.1 million unique active wallets (UAWs) in Q2 2022, making up 52 percent of all UAWs. Investor sentiment also remained strong in the blockchain gaming domain, with investments amounting to $2.5 billion in Q2 2022, a clip rate that appears to continue in the year.

Against this backdrop, NFT gaming launchpads and accelerators like QGlobe are helping new gaming projects build their products in a bear market. QGlobe offers support for metaverse and crypto gaming startups by organizing IGOs and providing product development, tokenomics, and marketing strategies.

Apollo Green, CEO and founder of QGlobe, says, “Amidst a turbulent market, the gaming sector is performing well and successfully weathering the storm. At this critical juncture, we need efficient gaming launchpads to build promising projects to help us out of this crypto winter.”

The Crypto Industry Needs Everyday Resources

Regardless of the size of startup, companies must manage employee payrolls and account for financial transactions, and annual audits. Payments and bookkeeping can be time-consuming and often become an enormous administrative challenge for these companies to tackle, leading to increased chances of fraud and data entry errors.

Automating the crypto finance infrastructure is necessary to help companies manage their accounts efficiently. Blockchain-based automated platforms can help save time, reduce human error via on-chain reconciliation, and ensure robust bookkeeping practices. Automation may also help crypto companies devote their time and resources toward innovation and building their platform.

Industry now offers solutions for Web3 businesses to manage their crypto invoices, employee salaries, and balance sheets.

Protocols like Request Finance provide a non-custodial, decentralized platform for invoice generation and payment management featuring real-time, on-chain settlement. Request Finance supports batch payments to multiple addresses, invoice requests, and integration with multi-sig wallets like Gnosis. Companies like The Sandbox, Maker DAO, and RealT use Request Finance for managing financial operations, invoicing solutions, and as a payment gateway.

Emphasizing the need for payment request protocols, Christophe L., co-founder and CEO of Request Finance, said, “Making crypto mainstream by focusing on real world use cases, is crucial for emerging from this bear market. Invoicing and payroll dApps can enable more businesses to adopt crypto, especially stablecoins in a compliant manner.”

For everyday crypto usage, investors, blockchain entrepreneurs, traders, and general users need one another imporant resource — tax calculators. As countries worldwide begin increasingly adopting crypto regulations, it likewise becomes necessary to understand tax liabilities and file for tax.

Calculating crypto tax is not an easy task. Users are liable for capital gains and income tax, depending on the nature of the transaction. Moreover, some countries require recording crypto transactions in local currency value before filing for taxes. This becomes a time and resource-intensive process.

Some users turn to resources like CryptoTaxCalculator to accurately calculate their taxes by importing transaction data from crypto exchanges and non-exchange platforms. CryptoTaxCalculator lets users directly upload data from DeFi platforms, staking protocols, NFT marketplaces, mining, ICO/IDO/IGOs, and airdrops via CSV or API for calculating taxes.

In-Person Discussion is the Most Important Resource

When it comes down to it, one resource emerges as the most crucial of all – talent. No matter how many software resources we have at our fingertips, nothing beats face-to-face conversations and exchanging ideas. Indeed, talent is the largest and richest resource we have for developing new products and innovative technologies.

Following a long pandemic-induced hiatus in conferences, meetings, and hackathons, these events are finally back for offline sessions. Through these events, crypto companies, blockchain entrepreneurs, and Web3 developers can all come together to discover technological solutions for solving real-world problems.

DCENTRAL will host one of Web3’s largest conferences this November 28-30 in Miami right before Art Basel, a massive global art event. The conference will bring together innovators across 30+ Layer-1 and Layer-2 DeFi, NFT, Metaverse, DAO, and Gaming protocols.

Justin Wu, co-founder and CEO of DCENTRAL Conference, elaborated on the need for such conferences, stating, “The bear market is giving us the time and space to build robust Web3 protocols. This is high time we collaborate and learn from each other to make Web3 sustainable in the long run.”

By using incubators, launchpads, accelerators, and business support services, and reconnecting to talent pools with in-person interactions, entrepreneurs and developers can create a veritable armada for taking on the bear market with a greater capacity to innovate. With the right resources and networks, successful earlier stage plays will weather the storm and emerge from the bear market with resilience: greater talent, stronger businesses, and more innovative products and services.