David Marcus Predicts Bitcoin Winter and New Cryptos Recover in 2024

David Marcus, CEO and founder of Bitcoin Lightspark company. (photo: Twitter @davidmarcus)

JAKARTA – Bitcoin and crypto winter will still take until at least 2024 for it to “recover from abuse by unscrupulous players.” This was stated by David Marcus, CEO and founder of Bitcoin company Lightspark, in a blog post released on December 30.

“Crypto winter will likely last until 2025,” said Marcus, as quoted by Cointelegraph. The statement was less than two months after the FTX crisis, the impact of which continues to unsettle sentiment and price performance.

For Marcus, who is best known for his crypto role at Meta and before that PayPal, bad actors have a lot to answer for, and their scourge will remain in the crypto industry beyond 2023.

While mentioning FTX only once, he referenced what he called "unscrupulous players" dragging on the poor market performance even beyond next year.

"We will not get out of this 'crypto winter' in 2023, and maybe not in 2024," said Marcus.

“It will take several years for the market to recover from unscrupulous player abuse, and for responsible regulation to emerge. Consumer confidence will also take several years to rebuild, but ultimately I believe it will prove to be a beneficial reset for legitimate industry players in the long term," he added.

If sellers need to wait for their “silver lining,” this could further disrupt the historical pattern that Bitcoin in particular has stuck to over the course of its existence.

In particular, the quadrennial halving cycle, which tends to produce growth in certain years, may face challenges. 2024, the next half year, is increasingly being considered a period of bullish price action, with some predicting an uptrend that started a year earlier in Q2, 2023.

Even though the recovery will take longer than expected, Marcus believes that a new, stronger industry will take shape once this happens.

“In crypto, years of greed will make room for real-world applications,” says Marcus. “The years of making tokens just like that and making millions are over. The music has stopped. We are returning to our regular program of creating real value and solving real world problems.”

He paid special attention to the Bitcoin Lightning Network, which he said, "will begin to show promise as the world's most effective open, interoperable, inexpensive, real-time payments protocol."

As Cointelegraph reported, other big names have also emerged to support crypto's long-term prospects post-FTX.

Among the most vocal is investment giant ARK Invest, whose CEO, Cathie Wood, didn't mince words about events nearly two months ago.

“Bitcoin blockchain has not skipped a beat during the crisis caused by opaque centralized players. No wonder Sam Bankman Fried doesn't like Bitcoin: it's transparent and decentralized. He can't control it," Wood said in a tweet that went viral in mid-December.

Meanwhile, in terms of price action, opinion continues to differ on how the first quarter of 2023 will likely go.

Some believe that the worst of Bitcoin's recent bear market is over, while others continue to warn of a deeper drop in BTC's price to $10.000 or lower.

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows BTC/USD trading around $16.500 on December 31.