Our thought experiment explores how the actors—simple traders, hodlers—would behave if one day they woke up to find that some evil wizard had cursed crypto. It becomes simply impossible to create new tokens or coins. It doesn't work. The machine won't allow it. There's nothing to do.
Binance announces that they will now—indefinitely—suspend the listing of new tokens. No more Launchpool, Launchpad, Megadrop, or HODLer rewards. And of course, other exchanges follow suit, partly through coordination, partly out of panic. The era of new coins comes to an end. Those who hadn’t jumped on the bandwagon until now probably won’t anymore.
This is the big situation, and everyone must adapt to the new, changed circumstances—or not. The DeFi ecosystem begins to stagnate, VC funding dries up, and the usual narratives—that something new will start in the next bull run, some new narrative, some new project—lose their meaning.
My theory is that in such times, interest would rekindle in old, long-forgotten tokens that sit at the bottom of the Spot tab or are hidden behind the "Hide small balances" option. Tokens nobody holds anymore, which were already about to be delisted years ago, but for some reason, they persisted. The fewer people still have them, the better.
In this changed world, even a rugpull would adapt to the circumstances. Instead of launching new coins with fake or shill campaigns, old, dusty, forgotten tokens would get a second life. The “repackaged past” would become the most valuable commodity of the future.
Memes would be reborn. Old whitepapers would be read again as if they held treasure. New theories would emerge about old supplies, wallet distributions, and tokenomics. People would start hunting for those token holders who entered in 2018 or 2021 and then forgot about them forever. The new rugpull wouldn’t start from zero but from some dusty low-cap at .0034 cents.
And what would happen to the small plankton—those still sitting there with portfolios worth 0.006 BTC? Probably the same as before. Waiting. Watching the charts. Maybe buying something at $7—like an AGIX or CTSI half, hoping that if there are no new coins, at least the old ones will come back to life.
This could be the crypto renaissance. Not forward, but backward. Finding the new in the old.
And if we think about it: maybe that’s always been what it was all about.
And the biggest mystery isn’t even why the machine stopped.
It’s why nobody missed the new anymore.