The Dark Side of the 2025 Bull Run: How Meme Coins, Leverage trading Are Wrecking Crypto

The 2025 crypto bull market is breaking records—but not in the ways that matter. Yes, prices are pumping, timelines are buzzing, and memes are flying. But beneath the surface, this market is more chaotic, shallow, and dangerous than anything we saw in 2017 or 2021.

What changed? Two things: meme coin mania and reckless leverage trading.

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1. Meme Coins Are Sucking the Life Out of Real Projects

Back in 2017, we had the ICO craze. In 2021, it was DeFi, NFTs, and institutional adoption. Both cycles had their excesses, but they still pushed real tech and experimentation forward.

Fast forward to 2025, and what’s dominating the landscape? Tokens named after frogs, dogs, and body parts. Meme coins are exploding in value while real, innovative projects struggle for visibility.

• Billions in liquidity are getting funneled into tokens with no use case, no devs, and no future.

• Teams building actual infrastructure or solving real problems are being overlooked in favor of the next viral token.

• Memes now move faster than fundamentals ever could—turning markets into short-lived popularity contests.

Result: the space looks more like a casino than a tech frontier. Long-term innovation is getting buried under short-term dopamine hits.

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2. Leverage & Degenerate Trading Are Turning the Market Into a Minefield

In 2017, most people didn’t even know what margin trading was. In 2021, leverage was growing, but still mostly centralized. By 2025, it’s everywhere—on centralized exchanges, DEXs, and even mobile apps targeting retail traders.

• Everyone’s a trader now, and many are using 25x to 100x leverage with no real understanding of risk.

• A tiny price movement can now trigger cascading liquidations, wiping out thousands of overleveraged positions in seconds.

• Volatility is no longer a feature of crypto—it’s the product.

Result: even fundamentally strong assets are being dragged into chaos. Trading activity is driven less by conviction or research and more by TikTok signals and Telegram pump groups.

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3. Retail is the Exit Liquidity—Again

The sad truth is that this cycle has turned into a well-oiled machine to drain retail wallets.

• Meme coins are launched, influencers hype them, whales pump them, and then the exit begins—leaving retail bagholding.

• Many new investors don’t last longer than a week before getting liquidated or scammed.

• This high churn rate means fewer long-term holders, less education, and a constant reset of the learning curve.

Result: trust in the crypto market continues to erode, and newcomers leave more jaded than informed.

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4. It’s a Bull Market Eating Itself

This bull market isn’t building toward something—it’s consuming itself. The same cycle plays out again and again:

Hype > Inflows > Meme Rally > Overleverage > Liquidations > Dump > Repeat

This isn’t healthy growth. It’s reflexive, fragile, and dangerously short-sighted. The more it continues, the more it undermines the credibility of the entire crypto industry.

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Final Thoughts

The 2025 bull run should have been a defining moment for crypto: scaling solutions are maturing, real-world adoption is growing, and global interest is rising.

But instead, it’s being hijacked by memes and margin.

Compared to 2017 and 2021, this cycle feels less like a step forward and more like a speculative bubble with a viral engine. If the space doesn’t redirect its focus soon—toward building, education, and sustainability—this bull run could be remembered not for what it achieved, but for what it wasted

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