The last six months were hard and challenging for most of us in the cryptocurrency space. Multiple market crashes harmed everyone from day-traders to whales and even well-established companies. Some went bankrupt, while others devised strategies for making the most of these times. Bitlocus is proud to be among those who have reacted quickly, developed and implemented the plan on how to survive and win in the bear market. Today, we will have an honour to hear about the strategy straight from the pioneer of the Bitlocus, Andrius Normantas. Our CEO dedicated some time to answer the questions that are really important for our community members.
How is Bitlocus doing during these months of the bear market?
Andrius Normantas explains:
Following the recent crash in cryptocurrency markets, Bitlocus' team has made important decisions to adapt to the constantly changing market conditions.
As to everybody, the Bitlocus team was also in shock to see so many big names going bust after the recent turmoil. Once industry leaders, some projects went insolvent and bankrupt.
We were disappointed with the Terra ecosystem falling apart, and how bad the situation was handled by the Luna Foundation Guard. Although we had chosen Terra's Anchor protocol for our staking product, we have always wanted to stay blockchain-agnostic, willing to offer the best offers for our users from different blockchains instead of promoting just one blockchain.
Watching the global developments, such as sky-rocketing inflation, possible recession, central banks interest rate hikes, Bitlocus braced for impact and prepared itself for the prolonged uncertainty in the global market.
However, even after the crypto prices had crashed and also crypto users had lost the interest in DeFi yield products, we witnessed the continuous growth of crypto assets being used for settlements and cross-border payments (Figure 1 with total Bitcoin transfer value). In this case, Bitcoin, USDT and USDC are mostly used as a store/transfer of value. This segment of market participants does not care much about the asset prices because of the very short period in time when assets are held on their books.
Therefore, diminishing retail interest in crypto shifted our focus more on B2B products and services. Business clients with working and time-proven business models are safe haven for service providers like us. They are enjoying our variety of B2B services: Merchant API, automated OTC desk, crypto payments gateway, and introductions to crypto-friendly banking providers.
There are also stubborn people in the market who continue to build their own unique products by white-labeling our infrastructure. These are serious players who are chasing their own ideas rather than price hypes, and the market period as this provides the tranquility needed to elevate your business ideas to perfection.
What are the further steps of surviving the falling market?
Andrius Normantas explains:
We are setting up our business in such a way that the asset prices, loss of retail interest, or bear market in general, would not affect our existence. The retail use of our platform is hedged with the features used by our business clients.
What is the team working on right now?
Andrius Normantas explains:
We are working on further implementing milestones according to our roadmap, as well as adding more focus to the B2B segment.
Some time ago we introduced Venus protocol as a replacement to Terra's Anchor protocol. We provide a fiat gateway to this protocol with the options that are added to our lending product. Starting with stablecoins DAI and USDC, we added more volatile asset (CAKE) for our risk-taking users. Besides that, we are also focused on delivering farming product by the end of September.
Regarding B2B products, I would like to remind that we have these services:
- white-label exchange
- merchant API
- crypto mass payouts
- IEO launchpad
- token listing
- crypto payments gateway
In addition to our work on DeRace project's NFTs last year, we have further expanded our experience in NFT field, providing the advisory and development services to our partners “The Nightingale of Freedom”, which is a charity project with all the money raised to be donated to #IAmUkraine fund.
The Nightingale of Freedom
A part of the income from B2B products (setup, monthly and trading fees) are being routed to purchase our BTL token, enabling a positive impact on BTL token demand with the growing success of our B2B products.
What's next?
Bitlocus will keep delivering the products and services for B2C & B2B clients, no matter what times we are living in. An experienced and ambitious team of managers, developers and marketers will search for the best way to get the maximum result out of every possible situation.