At ICODA, we’ve run marketing through several crypto cycles. The same 4 mistakes drain client budgets every bear market. One combination of tactics puts brands in the lead once the market turns.
Hyperliquid built its own L1 and perp DEX without a single dollar of VC funding during the 2022 bear market. Today the exchange ranks among the top 3 crypto exchanges by perpetuals volume (CoinGecko).
Why a Bear Market Is a Window of Opportunity
Attention gets cheaper during a bear market: some projects cut marketing, so there’s less competing noise in the feed. Users also get more demanding about the product itself. Hype without a real feature doesn’t hold an audience past one campaign.
Hyperliquid Labs designed the protocol in 2022, against the backdrop of the FTX collapse. The team built and tested its own L1, the HyperBFT consensus, and an on-chain order-book perp DEX in closed mode from late 2022 through early 2023, with no public marketing.
Our work shows the same mechanic in a different market. In the Rootstock (Bitcoin DeFi) case, ICODA’s report names the launch period directly: “during a period of broad market stagnation.” Over that period, the protocol reached 220 verified stakers, 48.3% of all new stakers on the network. Every staker went through manual Sybil verification, filtering out farm traffic. These aren’t vanity numbers for a report. They’re real holders who stayed with the product.
Who Else Built Through a Bear Market
Hyperliquid is part of a pattern, not an exception. Most infrastructure projects in the industry grew out of building during a downturn, not a rally:
| Project | Founder(s) | Bear Market | What They Did |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ethereum | Vitalik Buterin and team | 2014-2015, after the Mt. Gox collapse | Built and launched the network during a period of low interest in crypto |
| Binance | Changpeng Zhao | 2018-2019, after the 2017 ICO bubble | Built the exchange right after the ICO boom collapsed |
| Uniswap | Hayden Adams | 2018-2019 | Launched V1 while DeFi was a niche and the market was in a downtrend |
| Aave | Stani Kulechov | 2018-2019 | Moved from ETHLend to Aave and built the early DeFi product before DeFi summer |
| Solana | Anatoly Yakovenko | 2018-2019 | Ran technical development and early funding rounds before the 2020-2021 hype |
| Chainlink | Sergey Nazarov | 2017-2018 | Built oracles as infrastructure while the market chased ICOs |
| Avalanche | Emin Gün Sirer | 2018-2020 | Ran research and engineering work before mass hype |
Building the product is the entry ticket, not the win. Every team on that list still had to get the story in front of the right audience — and most bear-market campaigns fail right there.
What Doesn’t Work In a Bear Market
A bull market forgives almost any activity: attention arrives on its own. In a bear market, the same activity stops working.
| Activity | In a Bull Market | In a Bear Market |
|---|---|---|
| Ads | Any creative gets traction | Only ads with a specific product offer convert |
| Shilling on X | Hype posts without data get reach on their own | A post without numbers or facts sinks in the feed |
| Paid influencer shoutouts | “Ape in” calls pump the price | The audience reads these calls as a budget dump |
| Exchange listings | The listing itself drives a volume spike | A listing without utility gives a one-time spike and no retention |
| Airdrops and quests | Any quest pulls in farm traffic | Without a tie to real product use, it’s empty accounts |
| Giveaways and contests | Cheap engagement on the wave of hype | Attract bots, not an audience |
| Partnerships | The announcement alone drives engagement | Only a partnership with a concrete integration and metrics works |
A few more belong in the comparison:
- AMAs. A bull market tolerates a loose Q&A. A bear market needs a technical AMA backed by data.
- Memes. They land in a bear market only with a real insight behind them.
- Posting frequency. Depth beats volume: one data-backed breakdown outperforms five announcements.
- Price-talk content. Without a product angle, it reads as a distraction from the lack of real news.
Four mistakes repeat most often in a bear market:
- Shilling without a product edge. A campaign sells hype instead of a specific feature or UX advantage.
- Performance without a narrative. Traffic arrives but doesn’t return, because there’s no brand story or founder behind it.
- Airdrop farming with no product tie-in. A short spike in metrics and zero retention once the drop lands.
- SEO content built for keyword count. Articles cover the queries but carry no insider knowledge, so they don’t build trust.
By Service Line
SMM. Posts go out with no content calendar and no tie to the product roadmap. Content exists, but it doesn’t support releases.
KOL. Influencers get picked by rate per post instead of audience quality, and the budget lands in irrelevant or dead traffic. Our Oasis Protocol case disproves the idea that KOLs don’t work in a bear market: from January to April 2023, at the bottom of the market, a targeted KOL roster drove price up 109% and volume up 1,020%. KOLs work when targeting is disciplined, not when you pay for a mention.
PR. Press releases go out with no narrative and no protagonist: no founder, no real user, so the material never spreads on social. In May 2023, at the bottom of the bear market, ICODA ran a reputation case that moved negative search results from positions 6-8 down to 15+, through sustained content work rather than a single rebuttal.
SEO. Chasing article count over search intent grows traffic but not leads. In the 20lab.app case, one commercial cluster page replaced a scatter of thin articles and delivered an 80% traffic increase and the #1 ranking for “create a crypto token.”
Farm marketing. Campaigns with no onboarding or retention mechanic lose users the moment the reward lands. A typical airdrop with no real task or verification produces a numbers spike and zero retention.
What Works in a Bear Market
The same activities that fail without a product behind them work once a team ties them to something real.
Farm marketing tied to product. Hyperliquid pays out its HYPE token for real activity such as trading, using HyperEVM, and participating in new markets, not for follows or retweets. MythosWorld, a play-to-earn project ICODA worked with, ran the same principle through its airdrop: to qualify for tokens, participants had to leave real comments about the project and specific improvement suggestions, not just complete a click-through task. That filtered out bots by design before a single token went out.
Founder marketing. Jeff Yan, a former HFT quant, built Hyperliquid with no VC funding and gave most of the token supply to users. That story carries the brand and gives traders a reason to trust it beyond the interface.
Community management and PR working together. Before MythosWorld’s airdrop even opened, ICODA built a full SMM strategy across Twitter, Discord, Facebook, Instagram, and Telegram, with a community manager on Telegram and Discord to answer questions and handle negative comments during technical issues. Social monitoring ran in parallel: the team tracked Reddit and Twitter for conversations about MythosWorld and the play-to-earn niche and replied inside those threads: 3,243 targeted comments in real conversations, not automated replies. PR landed placements in Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance, Benzinga, GlobeNewswire, and AP News.
The result: more than 99,000 subscribers across all social channels, and over 100 organic comments a day from real fans, not farmed accounts.
Brand narrative timed to the product’s stage. Hyperliquid positions around self-custody and a model where the exchange earns from user activity rather than listing fees, a direct answer to the fear left over from centralized exchange collapses. World.xyz is running the earlier version of that same play right now: it’s building interest ahead of its listing through a “new world” narrative and product storytelling, without a finished mass-market product yet. The mechanic matches Hyperliquid’s early days: gated access, the social capital of the team and advisors, and anticipation of a future listing. If a brand has something at that stage today, a bear market is the moment to build the product and the reputation, not to wait for the next rally to start marketing.
Rootstock ran the same farm-marketing principle in a different market, filtering stakers through manual Sybil checks instead of counting raw sign-ups. Three products, one mechanic: reward real engagement, filter out farm traffic at the entry point, and back it with a narrative people can verify.
How Brands and Founders Should Act Now
- Build the product. Use the bear market for development and testing, the way Hyperliquid ran its closed alpha and seasonal incentives.
- Build the brand. Regular updates, transparent metrics, honest breakdowns of failed features, not just positive announcements.
- Push the founder forward. Public threads, interviews, and AMAs that show the team’s expertise and face, not just the project logo.
- Run a farm season tied to the product. Reward real actions inside the protocol: trading, using features, testing new markets, not empty touchpoints.
5 Questions About Your Product, Right Now
Before planning a bear-market campaign, a team answers 5 questions:
- Does the product have a feature a competitor can’t copy in a week?
- Can the founder name 3 product metrics without checking a dashboard?
- Is the team willing to publicly break down a failure from last quarter?
- Does the community stay active for 30 days without a new airdrop incentive?
- Does the brand’s content run without tying back to the token price?
Fewer than 3 “yes” answers is a signal to spend the bear market on the product and trust, not on campaigns.
Conclusions
The 2022-2023 bear market gave Hyperliquid cheap attention and time to build the product and trust before its 2024-2025 growth. Rootstock followed the same path in a different market: stagnation, manual audience qualification, and a durable base. MythosWorld followed it in a third: a bot-filtered airdrop, disciplined community management, and PR that turned into a genuinely active audience.
The best window to build a brand opens exactly when rivals go quiet and the market stops rewarding hype. Teams that spend a bear market on product and trust enter the next cycle in Hyperliquid’s position, not chasing it.
Frequently Asked Questions
No, because Hyperliquid didn’t skip marketing — it skipped the fake version of it. Jeff Yan built a product a small trading crowd trusted, then let trading volume and word of mouth do what a paid campaign usually does. If you don’t have a product edge yet, cutting spend and copying the “silent founder” move just means silence, not a strategy. The lesson to copy isn’t “no marketing,” it’s “no marketing until the product earns attention on its own.”
It works when you pay for reach among people who’d plausibly use the product, not for a mention from whoever has the biggest follower count. Most KOL budgets get wasted on rate-card influencers whose audience has no overlap with your actual user base, and that money produces nothing but a screenshot. Pay for targeting instead of reach, and you can move volume even at the bottom of a bear market. That said, this only works with real vetting — if you’re not checking audience quality, you’re just paying for the same shill problem people already distrust.
Founder visibility only converts when there’s a real number behind it. A founder who shows up but can’t name specific product metrics — active users, revenue, retention — reads as a face without substance, and people notice the gap fast. The traders who followed Yan weren’t reacting to his presence, they were reacting to the fact he had almost nothing to hide. If your founder is posting but not backing it with numbers, more posting won’t fix it — it just puts a face on an empty claim.
It stops working the moment it’s written to hit a keyword count instead of an actual question someone has. The 20lab.app result came from replacing scattered thin articles with one page built around real search intent, not from publishing more articles. Volume of content isn’t the lever — matching what people are actually typing into Google is. If your SEO plan is “more posts,” you’re solving the wrong problem.
It stops working the moment it’s written to hit a keyword count instead of an actual question someone has. The 20lab.app result came from replacing scattered thin articles with one page built around real search intent, not from publishing more articles. Volume of content isn’t the lever — matching what people are actually typing into Google is. If your SEO plan is “more posts,” you’re solving the wrong problem.
Because attention is cheapest exactly when everyone else stops buying it. Waiting means you’re competing with every other project the moment the market turns, all fighting for the same rally-driven eyeballs at once. The projects sitting near the top of the next cycle — Ethereum, Binance, Uniswap, Hyperliquid — all built through a downturn, not during one. Waiting feels safer, but it trades a cheap window now for a crowded one later.
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