Extreme Fear Remains: Recapping What’s Behind The Crypto Market Panic

The current streak of extreme fear is already the longest ever in crypto history, and it’s continuing on still. Here’s a recap of the major events responsible for this bottom sentiment.

The “fear and greed index” is an indicator that tells us about the general market sentiment among crypto investors.

The metric uses a numeric scale that runs from zero to hundred for representing this sentiment. All values below the fifty mark imply a fearful market, while those above the threshold mean investors are greedy right now.

End values of above 75 and below 25 indicate extreme sentiments of “extreme greed” and “extreme fear,” respectively.

Now, here is a chart from the latest weekly report from Arcane Research, that shows the trend in the crypto fear and greed index over the past year:

As you can see in the above graph, the current value of the crypto fear and greed index is 10, which suggests the market is extremely fearful at the moment.

This run of extreme fear has been going on since more than two months now, and it’s the longest ever such streak in the history of the metric.

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Even before this latest run of extreme fear, the market sentiment wasn’t particularly well during the rest of 2022. However, it wasn’t still quite as rock bottom as the current streak.

So, what’s behind this historically low sentiment? There are a number of market conditions that have lead to it and that are continuing to keep it so.

The first event of note is the UST collapse in May. A large stablecoin like Tether USD losing its peg put fear and uncertainty into many investors in the market.

Another is the looming macro uncertainties over the market like the possibility of FED hiking rates and the various governments around the world tightening regulations.

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These above factors snowballed into a bottom sentiment and lead to larger consequences over the entire crypto market in the form of the crash.

A byproduct of the latest crash was the collapse of Three Arrows Capital (3AC), a cryptocurrency hedge fund. Another was the lender company Celsius halting withdrawals and potentially heading towards bankruptcy.

Such negative news is keeping the fear and greed index from recovering from these historic lows. Like a vicious cycle, bad news is leading to more bad news and further fueling the extreme fear sentiment.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin’s price floats around $20k, down 1% in the past week.