This is an excerpt from The Node newsletter, a daily roundup of the most pivotal crypto news on CoinDesk and beyond. You can subscribe to get the fullCrypto winter isn’t quite a technical term . There’s no accepted definition. But anyone who is in crypto knows what it is and what it feels like. During winter, crypto prices are falling, crypto’s critics are on the warpath, VC dollars dry up and everyone’s looking for a new narrative.
Part of this is driven by macro factors, like the instability of the Middle East and the renewed threat of inflation. Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, described the recent rally in bitcoin as being driven by a “flight to quality” – the hunkering of investors for safety in times of uncertainty. Fink, of course, used to be an avowed crypto skeptic, someone who was more interested in Bitcoin’s environmental footprint than its potential as a safe-haven asset. Now this bellwether Wall Street figure is trumpeting Bitcoin live on national TV. And actually crypto winter may have ended before last week, if we’d paid more attention. Warmer times were already on the way back in January, according to“Since January, we've had significant regulatory progress outside the U.S.