GuShiio.com Leaving or waiting for the turn? Where should the first shot of change be fired?
Author: flowie, ChainCatcher
Editor: TB, ChainCatcher
If you are still looking forward to altcoins, you may lose some illusions when you see this set of data.
According to statistics from the dune panel created by @cgrogan, the number of types of crypto tokens has increased from more than 3.4 million in 2022 to more than 39 million in 2025. In 2024 and 2023, the crypto market created more than 10.09 million and 18.7 million tokens each year respectively.
In sharp contrast to this round of explosive growth in altcoins in the bull market, the number of cryptocurrency developers has declined instead of increasing. Electric Capital’s “Cryptocurrency Developer Report” shows that the total number of crypto developers will drop by 7% and 24% in 2024 and 2023 respectively.
The crypto market has long become a huge “coin issuing” factory without any secret. Apart from the coin issuing model and the introduction of new casinos, there are basically few new paradigm innovations to be seen here.
The reverse side of fairness and overnight wealth is the extremely low cost of doing evil and the large number of deceived ordinary users. In long-term PvP, all important participants, including users, are taught to be smart short-termists.
Leaving or waiting for the turn?
Yesterday, the Cryptocurrency Fear and Greed Index fell to 10, its lowest level since June 2022.@ ZKSgu refuted the externality of Crypto’s call,”No one in the venue can be retained.”
Exchanges and VCs, as the most criticized participants in this round of bull market, are looking for opportunities to leave or being forced to leave.
The established crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX is seeking to sell. According to people familiar with the matter, Deribit, the largest crypto options exchange, may have completed a merger agreement, and the merger amount may be as high as US$5 billion.
Not only exchanges, but the entire crypto field is ushering in a wave of mergers and acquisitions. According to RootData data, in the two months from 2025 to the present, there have been more than 20 mergers and acquisitions in the encryption field, with an average of more than 10 encryption mergers and acquisitions per month.
A large number of VCs are facing elimination. YettaS’s biggest feeling on Consensus HK is that VCs are everywhere: some VCs cannot raise the next round of funds, some VCs have lost half of their lives, some VCs have switched to war investment instead of investing independently, and some VCs even consider issuing Memes to raise funds.
Investor@26x14eth began to appeal to young people not to spend their most precious time focusing on gold mining in the currency circle, but to intern in potential AI and robot industries when they have the opportunity. Because this is not the 2017-2021 cycle when everyone can make money, the most precious asset right now is time.
But there are also people waiting for a change. Cryptographic KOL@cmdefi is less pessimistic. His feeling is that the current market is like 2018-2019. After the ICO bubble burst, everyone felt that this market had no hope and that it was all a scam.
“But DeFi Summer is here in 2020, speculative funds are reduced, and the market is more concerned about application innovation. Stay in the game. (Waiting for a transfer).”
Assembly line coinage crazy “blood-sucking”
This bull market is indeed hellish difficulty.
There are hardly any surprising encryption construction. From Trump’s drive to the “harvest” of celebrity coins, the launch of Pi coins to the recent attack of Safe by hackers, everyone woke up from a dream that the encryption system was so absurd and vulnerable.
The current status of the encryption ecosystem drawn by overseas KOL@sherlock has resonated with the market. In addition to the fragile encryption construction, cabal groups can be seen everywhere.
In this bull market, money is also harder to make.
Players who experienced the baptism of the last bull market may be particularly miserable. Binan and other places where the last round of wealth myths were created have become dumping places for big dog coins in the project party, and the so-called alpha peak is at its peak. PrestoResearch calculated that 100% of the tokens that were put online in the first month of 2025 fell by more than 70%.
If you hold one of the top 20 beta diamonds by market value, you will no longer be rewarded. Since July 2024, the top 20 tokens with market value have generally fallen by more than 60%. The Mao Party also lamented that it would still be difficult to escape being reversed if it were rolled and upgraded.
The seemingly fairer online PVP is even more common.
As of February 26, the number of tokens issued on the Pump.fun platform exceeded 8.1 million, the number of Meme coins with a market value of more than US$100 million was nearly 32, and only 154 with a market value of more than US$10 million. Now, after experiencing Libra and other celebrity coin scandals, online PVP is also coming to an end.
Without actual encryption construction, most people will not be able to make money. Where does all the money go?
Conflux co-founder Yuan Jie may have told the truth. Except for a very small number of smart hot shots, most of them have gone to various interests of the “assembly line coin issuance”.
Yuan Jie shared on Twitter,”The ‘Coin Issuing Factory’ is not only a VC, serial entrepreneurs, market makers, OL agencies, studios, large households, and exchanges, but also a complete assembly line, which is as greedily as a vampire. Sucking on this industry and leeks.”
In the crypto market, making and selling coins is the largest business model.
In Yuan Jie’s view, under the “coin issuing factory” model, the wealth creation process of the project party mainly focuses on the two core links of chip allocation and listing. The coin issuing model for this assembly line is:
- Find founders with endorsements from core circles (such as Vitalik, A16Z, Binance, etc.) or influential meme leaders to win low-priced chips
- Fabricate beautiful narratives and use artificial data (TVL, on-chain data, node size, etc.)
- Interest binding Kol Group completes Twitter Shilling (promotion)
- Hunting affects the core decision-makers of the company (how to 1) to complete the goal
- Afterwards, the Shanghai Stock Exchange started dumping through market makers and repeated the above steps to concoct the next project.
An investor in Web2 and Web3 also told ChainCatcher that because there is no R & D investment and the team does not have to support a few people, it will not be possible to die as long as the harvest is completed.”The market elimination mechanism has completely failed, and garbage projects and tokens are constantly getting more and more.”
But when ordinary users are no longer easily subjected to the “narrative” routine of collusion between the project party and the VC, the more crude meme coinage model has appeared. The same methodology, except that I don’t play with VC.
Behind the fair issuance of coins with almost no threshold is the extremely low cost of evil. Primitive Crypto investment partner @YettaSing believes that the Meme model is essentially a darker world on the chain than the VC model. Due to the lack of product and technical support,”absolute fairness” is often just a cover. Libra and other celebrity coin scandals have uncovered meme’s last fig leaf.
Where should the first shot of change be fired?
The wealth effect fails everywhere, and the industry has begun to reflect collectively and hold accountable.
Recently, public opinion has once again attacked the hair rolling studio. Encrypted kol@mscryptojiayi believes that altcoins cannot hold their heads high. They must be traced back to the moment when the “bribery system” was prevalent. The first shot of industry change must be hit at the hairdressing studio.
In her view, the studio and the project party “colluded” to build a “false prosperity” in the industry, which not only diluted the expected benefits of ordinary users, weakened users ‘long-term loyalty to the project, and caused the community to degenerate from a value community into a profit trading market. At the same time, it also laid the ground for the secondary sabotage.
She criticized that there are even many studios that have no bottom line colluded with fraudulent projects and carry out shameless behaviors of jointly building rat warehouses and deceiving exchanges and users.
But kol Ice Frog@Ice_Frog666666 of the airdrop track refuted it. He believes that “false prosperity” is the result of the distorted development of the industry, but not the cause. The studio is not the largest vested interests and rule-makers. If the knife does not cut at the largest vested interests and rule-makers, the reform is doomed to be ineffective.
In addition to the Maoming Studio, this bull market is believed to have gained two major interests in collusion with the project party. VC and CEX have been the targets of many attacks.
During the Hong Kong Consensus Conference, a Crypto VC even criticized the chaos of junk coins flying,”90% of VCs should close their doors.”
The rise of VC coins also stems from the fact that there were too many encryption scams after ICO, and projects after VC screening and endorsement were gradually recognized by retail investors.
However, this leader of retail investors has lost trust. Retail investors believe that VC can obtain chips at a lower cost and have information advantages, so they collude with project parties to dump tokens and harvest users.
In this round of bull market, VC coins generally have high valuations and low circulation, causing immediate market losses and a source of dissatisfaction among community users.
In last year’s AMA response to the Shanghai currency dispute, He Yi also bluntly said,”Some VCs are indeed the core reason for inflated prices.”
The injured are always ordinary retail investors.
As the most powerful link in wealth creation, exchanges are naturally considered to be responsible by the market.
Mainstream companies such as Binance and Coinbase have been frequently besieged by disputes over the listing of currencies in the past year. CEX’s sky-high coin deposit fee was once regarded by Simon, CEO of Moonrock Capital, as the biggest reason for the project party’s inability to bear it and the loss of market liquidity.
Although He Yi subsequently denied the sky-high “coin deposit fee”, CEX’s coin deposit mechanism and insider trading by the “girlfriends group” have always been questioned as one of the culprits responsible for the blood gain from garbage projects.
Although He Yi has repeatedly stated that Binance has a transparent and complex deposit process, recently the meme TST on the BNB chain was quickly launched and immediately smashed the offer. Even Zhao Changpeng began to question Binance’s deposit issue.
Not only exchanges and VCs, but almost any beneficiary in the “coin issuing factory” can be “revolutionized”. Crypto kol @CyberPhilos believes that the three major worms in the Crypto world are in addition to CEX, KOL Agency and market makers.
A general view is that the important participants in this bull market are too path-dependent, there is not enough native innovation, and everything fails after there is no new external liquidity entering the market. But is this an effect or a cause? Why can everyone in the chain become a “moth”?
Overseas kol Murtaza reflected,”Wealth comes long before practicality, not just a small mistake that will resolve itself over time. This actually poses a fatal threat to technology realizing its potential.”
Murtaza mentioned that the market value of the global cryptocurrency industry exceeds US$2 trillion. Typically, industries of this size form after something useful to society has been developed.
Cypher Capital co-founder Bill and Nothing Research partner@0x_Todd both have similar views when reflecting on the dilemma of VC and exchanges.
Bill said that Web3 Ventures and Web2 Ventures follow completely different logic. The former emphasizes that “early fame is the key” and the model of rapid wealth creation encourages founders to follow trends, focus on marketing and quickly go public on exchanges.
In Bill’s view, Web3 actually needs more “patient capital”-venture capital that adopts a Web2-style approach and supports founders in building long-term value in key markets so that teams can focus on product development rather than rushing to cash out.
The lack of encryption regulation is also the key to the problem.@ 0x_Todd said that all tactics such as “bribery, fraud, swiping, and cheating” should be used because they will not be punished.
At present, the encryption panic has reached a peak. Although everyone is held accountable and reflective, they are collectively trapped. Whether the industry can really “scrape bones and heal” and usher in the moment of clearing is still unknown.
