The Castle Chronicle: The End of the Bear or the Start of the Bull?

PLUS: New features for Perpetuals, Schizo's Bear Market guide

Dec 02, 2025

Welcome to Edition 149 of The Castle Chronicle!

Hello all!

Quick edition this week:

🔍 Market Watch
Basket trading, Conditional order; Perpetuals need to innovate.
Schizo’s Bear Market Survival Guide
Recommended Reads: MetaDAO ICOs, Hayes on a Spree, Bearish case for $HYPE
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🔍 Market Watch

Gm frens! It’s another red week for the crypto markets, as BTC continues bleeding out. Nothing much to do here :shrug:

Price Action

After distributing around the 120k$ area, BTC fell off a cliff and hasn’t quite stopped falling yet. Given the HTF trend, the expectation is still overall bigger re-accumulation and continuation towards ATHs. But even if that scenario is to play out, it’s gonna take weeks, if not months!

Top Performers

Sorting my 90d %, we can see that even the biggest winners over the past quarter are either bleeding out or going sideways. Of course, there’s always some outliers like $JUST, but those are just exceptions. Imho, this is not the time to look for trades, but rather the time to chill out and sit on cash.

Narrative Performance

Checking the last 90 days on the Narrative Performance charts gives us a clear picture of sellers being in control. The entire market is red, except for Privacy - something we’ve seen time and time again. If there is one thing to learn from these stats during bearish times, it’s the fact that Privacy is heavily demanded and should be on our radar! Once/If we return to bullish mode again, I’ll 100% look for setups in Privacy coins.

As boring as I might sound repeating this week after week, it needs to be said that these are times to be sidelined. It’s important to set our expectations correctly - the crypto market might take weeks or months to provide setups to either side.

As traders, it’s our job to seek opportunities in markets that are ripe to be traded, markets that are in season! Right now, I’m looking at silver, gold, and potentially even the US stock market. These markets have good top-down alignment, with one side clearly winning. Those are the conditions we seek as traders.

Once the crypto market becomes interesting again, I’ll tell you all about it. But until then -

Risk responsibly, and I’ll see y’all next time!

Courtesy of 0x_Vlad - trend-based trader and MentFX student

Not following what I’m talking about? Check out my quick cheatsheet to understand how I approach a chart.

Basket trading, Conditional order; Perpetuals need to innovate.

As I am working for Pear Protocol. Its important to have a disclaimer to start this small piece.

But Recently, this protocol released the V2 of their Hyperliquid product which remained centric on LONG & SHORT trading but integrated as well a strong focus on Basket trading.

Users can enter a complex LONG/SHORT basket in 1x click via TWAP or via other order types.

& since loads of new HIP-3 markets are being integrated into the Hyperliquid frontend (mostly tech stock ATM) & those are easily integrable for any protocol on the HL builder code API. Then you can now easily LONG strong TECH stock & SHORT crypto asset losing moment. Almost a money glitch.

Insilico Terminal has been offering some products related to basket trading, but in a more professional fashion, Pear Protocol being more retail-focused.

But regardless of Pear or of other trading protocol. I now firmly believe that the future of the perpetuals platform is to enable more complex & especially more profitable trading strategies for their users. I think more people in the perp space are waking up to it.

A good example of protocol building a cool feature to make its users more profitable is: SuperCexy

They have been shipping innovative features with a goal to reduce fees to the maximum for traders & increase the efficiency in their execution via complex conditional orders.

Many big perp tradors i know have been washed out since 10/10. Platform cant expect their trad00r to come back if they ALL broke. For me, the future for perpetuals is simple:

Make sure their users can come back to the platform because they make moneY on it. You gotta need to innovate and cant base all your moat on them farming your points seasons.

Have a good week

From CL, with love

Schizo’s Bear Market Survival Guide

Alright, I already know what you’re thinking.

“We’re not in a bear market, this is just a pullback. And if it was, where was this article before we dropped 30%??”

Let me start off by saying this: I have no idea what kind of market we’re in, but I fully believe in preparation. I’ve been through a few different bear markets, and each one was rough for different reasons.

What concerns me is that many of you haven’t been through a traditional crypto bear market and don’t know what to expect. I know most people will assume that if they lived through FTX and Covid, they know what true bear markets are.

To be honest, I don’t really believe that to be true. I consider those periods black swan events.

Sure, price went down in basically a straight line, but bear markets have a way of beating you down, depressing you, and sowing doubt.

Back in 2018, BTC had been ranging and bouncing off of the 6k level for months. Every bounce higher made everyone think we were so back, only to fall back to 6k over and over again, until it finally broke.

Why was this so brutal?

Well, this bear market lasted around 460 days in total. Nearly a year straight of no movement, depressed prices, teams quitting, and market participants wallowing in misery.

That is a completely different story from the market we’ve known the past few years, but it is still a possibility that you must prepare for.

So let’s get into what you can do to help protect yourself during a potential bear market!

Capital Protection (Cut the Ties)

This is one of the most important chapters in this survival guide, and for good reason! Imagine getting to accumulate cheap BTC and ETH over the course of months, but not having the capital to do so.

This was me back in 2018/2019, and it was absolute misery. I had all the time in the world, but after paying bills, I was left with very little to buy my cheap coins.

So where did I fail?

I held my altcoins way too long and stubbornly refused to cut ties.

Many of you have probably done this or are considering it, and I have to warn you: it is the biggest trap you can walk into. It’s easy to believe that you’re invested in great coins, or that they’ll go back up again. Trust me, I’ve been there.

The thing you don’t hear about is what its like to witness majors like BTC/ETH going down to levels you didn’t think you’d see anymore and not having the spare capital to pull the trigger.

The best way to make sure your capital is protected and ready to buy in any deep dip is to examine your portfolio closely.

Are you happy with your current bags? Are you good with them going down 50%?

How about 70%, 80%?

If the answer is no, you sell out of your position, take the loss, and take the time to reevaluate your portfolio.

Then once you’ve done that, you can either keep the money in crypto and farm stables (likely at depressed rates), or remove it entirely and take your chips off the table.

The game is to avoid being wiped out entirely, living to fight another day.

It’s near impossible to start over from zero, and it is much easier to begin again from a position of strength.

Take Your Time

It’s really easy to get caught up in the excitement of markets and lose sight of how long movements can take to play out or reset. The world’s attention span is so much shorter than it has ever been, and us crypto enjoooyors have even shorter ones.

A lot of the worst decisions I’ve made in crypto are due to thinking that things would move on a faster, arbitrary timescale, and that usually doesn’t happen in a prolonged bear market — even if said bear market only lasts a few months.

It can take a mental toll on you when you’re anticipating holding through a short drawdown, as opposed to a months-long one. Essentially, you need to resist the FOMO and do the exact opposite.

What’s nice about this literal change of pace is that you get the opportunity to move slowly and research your way through the bear cycle. Instead of doing the bare minimum on your due diligence, you can make informed decisions on tokens and see if it is worthy of your money, as opposed to aping into a ticker you saw on CT.

Touching Grass

This is the ultimate hack for nearly everyone, and this time I’m not using it as a meme! One of the easiest ways to make the time pass and keep you from capitulating on your bottom buys is to get busy and touch grass.

Spend more time with family and friends, walk outside, get back amongst real people, not PFPs. It’s easy to disconnect from the real world in our little circle of internet weirdos, but bear markets are the perfect time to walk away from the screens a bit more.

One of my favorite things to do in past bear periods was to pick up a good book series or video game. They pass the time well, reset your brain a bit, and keep you from making any dumb decisions.

Sometimes it is best to just sit on the sidelines, play some video games, and come back to the market when conditions are more favorable.

The Whole Package

Now, I feel I have to reiterate that I don’t know if this is a temporary bear market (although one can argue alts have been in a bear market since January), or if its going to be months long. That’s the beauty of it all, I have no idea.

But what I do know is that it has paid to be prepared for all outcomes, good or bad. Having a plan for these possibilities is good for your brain and makes it easier to make these hard decisions.

This was meant as a general guide to how I think about these periods of choppy/downward price action, and how I keep myself preoccupied. There’s nothing worse than overtrading during these periods and pissing away your hard-earned capital.

These are times to be patient, execute at places that make sense, and prepare for when things are overly bullish again.

Don’t get chopped up, don’t zero out, and remember: bear markets are opportunities for the well-prepared.

Written by Schizo!