Crypto Is Down Over 50% From Its All-Time High. We’re Still Making Money.

You might be wondering how that’s even possible.

If prices are down, aren’t we losing money? That’s the assumption most people make. It’s also why most people lose money in crypto.

Price is the most obvious thing to look at. But it’s far from the whole story.

Think about it this way. These aren’t just coins sitting around waiting for hype to drive the price up. They’re real businesses running entirely on the internet, 24/7, with no offices, no traditional employees, and no off switch. And they generate real revenue.

Ethereum collected $2.48 billion in transaction fees in 2024 alone. Solana’s ecosystem generated $2.85 billion in revenue in 2025. 

Uniswap (a trading platform with no physical headquarters) averaged close to $93 million per month in fees last year. Aave, the lending platform we’ll talk about later in this article, grew its annual revenue from $5 million in 2022 to over $141 million in 2025. 

Hyperliquid, a trading platform that’s barely two years old, spent $644 million buying back its own token in 2025, funded entirely by trading fees.

None of those numbers care what price Bitcoin is trading at.

That’s because what keeps these platforms making money isn’t the price of a token. It’s people using them. Every swap, every loan, every transaction generates fees. Price goes up and down. Usage keeps going. And in a down market, understanding that is the difference between sitting on the sidelines and staying in the game.

Here are the strategies we actually use to keep making money when prices are down.

1. Hedging Your Portfolio

This one is simple once you understand the concept.

If you make money when prices go up, hedging is the opposite: it makes money when prices go down. This is how big investment funds protect themselves no matter what the market is doing.

Here’s a simple example: You believe Bitcoin will hit $100k again someday. You don’t want to sell it. But the price is dropping right now.

You could hedge by opening a short on BTC. A short is a bet that the price will go down. As Bitcoin drops, your short makes money. Your actual Bitcoin stays in your wallet, untouched, waiting for the market to recover.

When the market turns around, you close the short and let your Bitcoin ride back up.

You make money on the way down. You’re still set up to make money on the way back up.

2. Liquidity Providing (Done Carefully)

Liquidity providing (or LP’ing) can work in any market: up, down, or sideways.

The catch is something called impermanent loss (IL), and it’s important to understand this correctly because it’s one of the most misunderstood things in crypto.

Impermanent loss doesn’t only happen in a bear market. It happens any time the price moves outside of the range you set when you entered. Here’s what that actually means:

When you provide liquidity, you choose a price range and deposit two assets into a shared pool. As the price moves toward the edge of your range, the pool automatically starts swapping one asset for the other to stay balanced. If the price moves completely out of your range, you’ve been fully swapped into whichever asset became cheaper, and you stop earning fees.

In a bear market, this gets painful fast. As prices keep dropping out of your range, you’re basically selling your crypto for less and less. You then have to reset your range at an even lower price, and the whole thing starts over. Each reset locks in more loss. That’s why bear markets are especially rough for LP’ers. Not because the concept is flawed, but because falling prices just keep pushing you out of range over and over again.

So what do we do instead?

We borrow against our existing crypto to LP without touching our original holdings.

Here’s how: Say you have 10 ETH and the market is dipping. Instead of sitting on it and earning nothing, you deposit it into a lending platform like AAVE. You borrow a portion of its value (say 40-50%) and use those borrowed funds to LP.

The fees you earn from LP’ing go toward paying off the loan or go straight into your pocket as profit. When prices recover, you repay the loan and pull your original ETH back out, untouched.

You’re not LP’ing with your full stack, but you’re also not sitting on your hands while the market figures itself out.

3. Depositing Your Crypto to Earn Interest

This one is simple and low effort.

Platforms like AAVE let you deposit your cryptocurrency and earn interest as other users borrow it. You’re not trading. You’re not actively managing anything. You’re just letting your money work while you wait.

The interest rate is usually in the single digits. Not life-changing, but it’s real money on crypto that would otherwise just be sitting in your wallet doing nothing.

4. Staking

Staking won’t make you rich overnight. But it’s one of the most reliable, low-effort ways to keep your crypto working.

When you stake, you lock up your tokens to help keep the network running. In return, the network pays you rewards, kind of like earning interest.

It’s not the biggest earner on this list, but it’s steady, relatively low-risk, and it beats holding and earning nothing.

5. Vaults

This one is worth knowing about because most people overlook it.

Take Jupiter’s JLP vault as an example. It sits on the other side of their trading platform, collecting fees from every trade that happens on it. You put your money in, and in return you get a share of those fees. It also gives you exposure to assets like SOL, ETH, Bitcoin, and USDC, so you’re not just sitting in cash.

Here’s what makes it interesting in a down market: that’s when traders tend to lose the most. And when traders lose, the vault earns. Someone always has to be on the other side of a trade, and in a wild market, that’s often the vault.

It’s one of those strategies that can quietly do well when everything else is bleeding.

6. Trading (With More Discipline)

Yes, you can still trade in a down market. But you have to approach it differently.

In a bull market, almost everything goes up. You can buy something and watch it go up a few days later without much thought. Down markets don’t work that way.

You have to be more careful about when you buy in, more patient, and quicker to take profits when you have them. The opportunities are still there. A choppy market creates them. But there’s less room for mistakes.

7. Dollar Cost Averaging (DCA)

Last, and honestly one of the most important.

Down markets feel awful. But they’re the best time to buy the right crypto at the lowest prices.

Dollar cost averaging means buying a set amount of a cryptocurrency on a regular schedule, regardless of what the price is doing. As prices drop, you’re picking up more tokens for the same amount of money. When the market comes back, you’re sitting on a much bigger position than you would have if you’d waited for the “perfect” moment to buy.

This is how a lot of the world’s most successful investors built their wealth. They bought when everyone else was scared and selling cheap. They held on. And when things turned around, their portfolios didn’t just recover. They took off.

Down markets separate the people who actually understand crypto from the people who only showed up for the bull run.

The tools are all there. The strategies work. But knowing they exist and knowing how to actually use them are two different things. Reading about LP’ing is one thing. Watching someone do it with real money in a real market is something else entirely.

That’s exactly what we do inside the Dypto Community Platform. Every strategy on this list is something we actively use, and members can watch it all play out in real time through the Dypto portfolio. The entries, the adjustments, the reasoning behind each move. It’s all there, live, as it happens.

If you want to see how this actually looks in practice, not in theory or a simulation, that’s where to be.