May 19: The Bull Market’s First Cold Shock

Background: Before May 19, the studio was waiting for Tyson’s side to review the Iron Pigeon demo while continuing to revise matchmaking. The market had begun to look tired, but the team was still working along parallel financing and product tracks. Night Watchman, a long-standing community member, saw bringing ordinary people on-chain through games as a direction worth defending.

Today: From the afternoon on, the market seemed to lose its floor. BTC cascaded down from USD 43,000, reaching an intraday low near USD 30,000; ETH fell harder, plunging from USD 3,400 to below USD 2,000, nearly halving in a day. News that China had reiterated its ban on financial institutions providing crypto services became the trigger. Leveraged longs were liquidated in waves, several leading exchanges lagged or went down at the height of panic, and people trying to sell at a loss could not get through the door. Total liquidations across the market set a record. For the first time, panic flooded Discord. Some posted liquidation screenshots, some asked, “Are we still building this project?” and others quietly left the server. Night Watchman posted a long message: he had not bought this candlestick, but the idea that “games can bring ordinary people on-chain”; if prices fell back, he would treat it as though they had never risen. The message stayed pinned at the top of the conversation all night. The studio held its regular meeting that evening, with only two agenda items: the Iron Pigeon demo feedback list and the second set of matchmaking parameters. Someone proposed a tweet to “reassure the community,” but the idea was rejected: the product had not changed, so there was nothing worth reassuring people about. Before the meeting ended, management decided to plan the money on hand for two years of bear market and put that plan into effect immediately. The narrator stayed late at the office. San Francisco fog rolled in as usual beyond the windows, while the screens glowed red. The small studio had not issued any token, so on a day when others were collapsing, there was no position of its own to collapse—perhaps the only piece of luck that night. The narrator wrote: Bull markets teach greed; crashes teach discernment. That day made it plain who was doing the work and who was only dreaming.

Impact and next steps: The crash turned market risk from an abstract worry into exchange failures, liquidations, and community departures, and clarified the studio’s choices: do not hide an unchanged product behind soothing words; keep attention on demo feedback, matchmaking, and the two-year cash plan. Night Watchman’s message steadied the conversation for a while, but it did not answer how many people would stay. Tyson’s feedback, the algorithm’s results, and the long bear market still lay ahead.