Bear markets are scary but they turn out to be great investment opportunities too, especially if you're cautious about moves.
During bear markets, supply is greater than demand, confidence is low, and prices are on a downtrend
Photo Credit: Unsplash/ Anne Nygård
People began talking about another crypto winter in January, when falling prices had wiped out $1 trillion (roughly Rs. 77,69,223 crore) in value from November's peak. Prices rallied back in March, restoring some of the losses. But we are in the midst of a massive crypto crash yet again and while that means that a majority of first-time retail investors aren't convinced if crypto is a right investment, there are ways to begin a portfolio now, without having to run the risk of losing big.
To begin with, here's how much the top cryptos are down as compared to their all-time highs.
Bitcoin is down 58 percent
Ether is down 62 percent
BNB is down 55 percent
Cardano is down 84 percent
Solana is down 83 percent
Dogecoin is down 89 percent
Polkadot is down 83 percent
So what should a new investor do?
If I was just starting out with crypto and had a zero budget, I would earn free cryptos. There are 2 ways of doing this:
New crypto startups use airdrops as a marketing strategy. They give free cryptos in return for promoting their website and social media accounts. You can get a list of the latest airdrops from coinmarketcap.com and airdropalert.com.
Many cryptos run small courses to build awareness about their project. You need to watch a small video and take a small quiz and you get free cryptos. This is called Learn and Earn. You can also earn free cryptos by playing online games (play-to-earn) or even by walking (move-to-earn).
Once you decide to take things to the next level, you should focus on unlisted strong projects with solid prospects. But how should you evaluate a new crypto project?
Use the ROHAS method - Revenue, Organisation, History, Algorithm, and Social.
Understand and analyse how the project generates revenues for the ecosystem and what is the global economic impact of the project? This information can be obtained from the official website and whitepaper of the project.
The organisation/ team (founders, dev, business) must be highly-skilled and respected with strong prior experience, strong credibility, and positive social media status. This information can be obtained from the LinkedIn profiles of the team members.
The project must have shown strong growth in the number and transactions of active users.
The consensus mechanism and technology platform must be robust. This information can be obtained by an analysis of the project's GitHub repositories.
The project must have a large, vibrant, active, engaged, positive community with a fair share of fanatics. The major social platforms are Discord, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Medium, Reddit, Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.
Rohas Nagpal is the author of the Future Money Playbook and Chief Blockchain Architect at the Wrapped Asset Project. He is also an amateur boxer and a retired hacker. You can follow him on LinkedIn.
Cryptocurrency is an unregulated digital currency, not a legal tender and subject to market risks. The information provided in the article is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, trading advice or any other advice or recommendation of any sort offered or endorsed by NDTV. NDTV shall not be responsible for any loss arising from any investment based on any perceived recommendation, forecast or any other information contained in the article.
Catch the latest from the Consumer Electronics Show on Gadgets 360, at our CES 2026 hub.