After increasing by 300% in 2020, then doubling again, Bitcoin has been in a down-trend since peaking above $68,000 USD in November. After losing over 15% in April, the BTC price then did the same (in percentage terms) again in May.
If that weren't enough, we then went on to lose over 30% (!!) in June alone.
Bear markets in Bitcoin are rarely fun. When we get into these “crypto winter” periods, people don't want much to do with crypto-currency in general — nevermind interest in spending it.
On an ostensibly positive note, this negative trend in crypto-coins corresponds with poor performance in technology investments in general. Since November, the Nasdaq has lost a quarter of its value and Netflix, for example, has lost roughly 70%.
Hanging in There
But in spite of the horrible sentiment we are trudging along, however modest the pace. We're still believers in the big-picture view of 'crypto'.
Though this blog update is long overdue, we have been busy improving Spendabit. Amongst other things, we are continually making improvements to our product-detection engine — which picks out and “scrapes” products from thousands of websites — as well as our product-identification engine — which attempts to ascertain how to categorize each product, to make search results more accurate.
(Simple as it sounds, it's tricky! The challenge has to do with consistency; each website is different.)
Navigating the Crypto-Sphere
Spendabit has always been about spending bitcoin — and now other crypto-coins too — but we realized it wouldn't hurt to begin listing general-purpose crypto services as well. Thus, as long as they don't degrade our search experience and ease-of-use for products, we will now accept listings from exchanges, crypto wallets, news sites, gaming platforms, and other resources.
Stay tuned.