To state the obvious, bear markets are not fun. There's a reason they say bear market are for building... because after listening to complaints and seeing good teams go down, there's nothing else that can be done. These are the things I've seen in the 18/19 and 22/23 bear markets that are repeating for 26: > Well-established teams shut down > New projects fizzle out > Existing projects stop posting updates with frequency > When they do post, it's little to do with the product > New devs/teams aren't coming to your chain > Long-standing token holders are underwater and mad (even more so if they've been in your altcoin for multiple cycles, b/c they're probably down bad) > M&A becomes the norm, the big guys acquire the little guys > Those with money, exit their cushy positions with... more money > Hope, just generally... fades away Basically, the ecosystem starts eating itself from the inside, while also fighting to survive from external factors and market conditions. In-fighting becomes the norm, and the purchasing power of the treasury dwindles with the token price. To survive, an ecosystem/foundation needs to double down on a particular vertical (or narrative) and aggressively build and work toward that vision. Further, it needs to seek to *innovate* and build something new in that vertical, or else any effort just becomes noise, a copy-paste of what others are doing elsewhere. In the 2026 bear market, if you want to see your project succeed, it needs to be building something **new** and **useful/adoptable** in payments, stablecoins, payments, RWAs, or AI agentic tooling. If there's nothing new, meaningful, or useful coming from those verticals, then it's hard, almost impossible, to see a long-term future.