This article is a history, reconstructed from public record. Prices are approximate and stated to the precision the argument needs. Nothing here is investment advice. Decisions are yours.
2022 was crypto's most instructive year: a top-to-bottom winter in which BTC fell roughly 65% inside the calendar year, three separate credit collapses each forced the next, and the signal-selling industry's track records overwhelmingly ceased to exist. Anyone evaluating any crypto service should ask one question first: show me your 2022.
Act one: the macro turn (Q1)
The year opened with BTC already well off its November 2021 peak near $69,000, and the first quarter's story was not crypto-native at all: the fastest monetary tightening cycle in decades repriced every long-duration risk asset, and crypto, by then institutionally plumbed, traded as the longest-duration risk asset of all. BTC ground down through the mid-$40,000s and $30,000s with breadth decaying ahead of price, the classic divergence signature. Notably, a simple published trend condition of the kind our dial reads today, price relative to its own MA50, sat risk-off for most of the year from its earliest weeks: nothing clever, merely the arithmetic refusing to call a falling market rising.
Act two: Terra (May)
In May the algorithmic stablecoin UST lost its peg and its defense mechanism hyperinflated the sister token LUNA toward zero, erasing roughly forty billion dollars in days: a textbook demonstration of what a depeg does, and of the wound it left in the price history. BTC broke into the mid-$20,000s. More important than the price was the credit: Terra's collapse vaporized collateral across every lending desk that had touched it, starting a fuse that burned invisibly for a month.
Act three: the contagion summer (June-September)
June detonated the fuse: the largest retail lending platforms froze withdrawals mid-month, a major crypto hedge fund was revealed insolvent, and forced liquidation of their books drove BTC to a June low near $17,600, with cascade wicks and the correlation-one behavior that collapses the whole board into one factor. Customers of the frozen platforms learned what being an unsecured creditor of an exchange means in practice. A summer relief rally carried into August, and September's long-awaited Ethereum consensus transition landed as a textbook sell-the-news: structurally historic, priced in advance, and irrelevant against the credit weather.
Act four: FTX (November)
November delivered the ending: a top-tier exchange revealed as insolvent, a failed rescue, a run, a bankruptcy, and a customer shortfall on the order of eight billion dollars, the full sequence exchange risk had always described. BTC printed the cycle low near $15,500 in the aftermath, roughly 77% under the peak twelve months earlier, one of the observations the drawdown base rates are built from, and the alt tail sat far deeper. The year closed with the asset class at roughly a third of its calendar-year opening value and the industry's reputational capital lower still.
What 2022 did to each species of participant
Holders rode the full base rate and, the behavioral record says, capitulated disproportionately near the lows. Leverage users mostly did not reach December: three separate cascade complexes liquidated each cohort as it rebuilt. Trend discipline, the unglamorous MA-and-breadth kind, spent most of the year in stables by construction, eating whipsaws at the edges and missing the middle of every collapse: in a year like this, that is the whole product trend following on BTC sells. And the signal industry died of disclosure: feeds that marketed 90%+ win rates through 2021 went silent, deleted, or rebranded, which is why so many of today's track records begin, conspicuously, in early 2023. That silence is the year's most durable lesson and this site's founding argument: a record that cannot show you its 2022 is not a record, and the fix is attesting the record as it is made. Winters are when honesty becomes measurable. Decisions are yours.