Surviving the Crypto Winter as a Web3 Brand
If you’ve spent more than five minutes in Web3, you’ve probably seen more rug pulls than a medieval castle renovation. One minute a project’s got laser-eyed influencers shilling it to the moon, and the next, the Discord’s a ghost town and the devs are “pivoting to AI.” We’ve all been there. In fact, last bear market I invested in a project called “UpOnly”.
Doge coin hase one of the biggest communities in Crypto
Skip the Hype, Build the Heart
it’s not just bad luck or market cycles that wipe these projects out. It’s because a lot of founders chase hype instead of building heart. They launch with fireworks, airdrops, and some AI-generated lore about decentralized unicorns, but when the market cools down? So does the interest. Turns out, people don’t stick around for tokenomics spreadsheets—they stay for stories, community, and trust.
If the only reason folks are retweeting your content is because BTC is flirting with $100k again, you don’t have a brand—you’ve got a sugar high. It’s like trying to build a restaurant that only opens when there’s a food festival in town. Sure, you’ll get traffic during the bull run, but when the festival’s gone and the Ferris wheel packs up, who’s coming back?
Building a brand that lasts in Web3 is hard. Attention is currency, and in a bear market, everyone’s short on both. But the projects that make it? They’re the ones that keep showing up—posting, building, engaging—when the chart looks like a ski slope and no one’s watching. They speak human, not just “blockchain.” And they make people feel something deeper than FOMO.
Tweet from CryptoAwdang
Real Brands Don’t Vanish When the Market Does
Take a look at the legends that survive the storm—Uniswap, Chainlink, or even the cheeky namecoin projects that turned into actual communities (shoutout to Doge and Shiba, still woofin’ in 2025). They didn’t just throw tokens around. They built memes and meaning. They made people feel like they were part of something. You can’t fake that—not even with a slick website and some GPT-generated roadmap.
Another important tip to survive a crypto winter is to cut your costs and narrow down your focus to a smaller highly targeted audience. The popular crypto wallet “Phantom” did just that by narrowing their focus to a “minimum viable audience”. In Phantom’s case, they chose the Solana community. Phantom positioned itself as the primary wallet for Solana, benefiting from the blockchain’s rapid adoption and low transaction fees. By also facilitating strategic collaborations with Solana-based projects (e.g., Jupiter, Tensor, Magic Eden, Raydium, etc), they were able to onboard users directly from dApps. And they capitalized on Solana’s DeFi + NFT boom, becoming the default wallet for popular Solana applications.
The best founders I’ve seen are also the best storytellers first. They talk about their mission until you can recite it in your sleep. They’re around when the price dips, when their Discord is quiet, and when everyone else is pretending to be AI founders now. They get on spaces. They reply to random DMs. They’re not hiding—they’re human. And weirdly enough, that’s become rare in Web3.
Phantom has become one of the biggest apps in the whole Web3 space
The Real Flex? Still Being Here When the Bull Comes Back
Don’t try to look big. Try to be the kind of builder 100 people would follow through a bear market without checking the price. That’s brand equity. That’s trust. And trust is the only thing that doesn’t dump when Bitcoin does.
I know, it’s 2025—everything’s about AI, ZK this and L2 that—but some truths haven’t changed: hype burns fast. Brand burns slow. The miners who rebranded, the NFT projects that turned into actual businesses, and the DAOs that figured out governance before their token tanked? They’re still here because they played the long game.
So the next time you’re tempted to spend your last ETH on building a meme token with a dancing frog mascot, ask yourself: are you building for the bull, or are you building for the decade. Because in this space, the real flex isn’t making a million overnight. It’s being around for the next summer and making millions with your community while making a difference.
