I don’t know if you have ever thought about what the 'original sin' that caused this wave of corpses on the chain really is? The answer is the Pump-style meme asset issuance method that everyone knows is toxic, yet still takes a small sip.
Initially, the Pump-style internal and external market activation model allowed many small players to win a higher probability of investment returns through sitting still and trial and error. Coupled with the FOMO amplification effect of market sentiment after running out of the external market, the Pump method of issuing assets once became mainstream.
But, success comes from Pump, and failure also comes from Pump. The essence of the Pump way of issuing assets is:
1) It is the short-term industrialized production of tokens. This way of issuing tokens focuses on standardized operations, low barriers to entry, and rapid mass production, which leads to most projects issuing tokens without a complete project plan, let alone talk about technological innovation and product landing, focusing solely on mass production, reissuing after a break.
If this continues, the token 'project parties' will become the absolute upstream of the liquidity harvesting assembly line, while the investors downstream will be reduced to 'chips', forever trapped in a strange cycle of losing whatever they buy and being wrong in whatever they do.
2) It is the deconstruction of the past 'technological narrative'. In the last two cycles, there were some meaningless MEME tokens, but the mainstream market still honored the technological narrative of decentralization, from layer 1 pursuing high TPS in the performance battle, to layer 2 building Rollup public chains for expansion purposes, and then to the iteration of technological narratives such as modularization, account abstraction, chain abstraction, Staking, Restaking, etc.
Although in the end it is also too weak in terms of application landing, these narratives have a relatively long market competition involution and digestion cycle. Moreover, technological innovation, team strength, operational accumulation, etc., will become value assessment indicators in the process. At the same time, participating in airdrops, contributing to the Grant ecosystem, and horizontal and vertical cooperation of projects are all sufficiently rich and suitable for the value preference of long-termism.
However, after the Pump, the nihilism of meme-ifying everything has completely changed the industry ecology. Market participants no longer believe in the power of technological innovation, nor do they pursue long-term PVE growth concepts, but instead are trapped in a short-term PVP zero-sum game, destroying the technological innovation value system that the crypto world relies on.
3) It is the over-reliance on attention FOMO economics. Originally, the vertically segmented narratives of Crypto had different communities, each track had a certain layout of funds and users, but when a project exploded in growth, users' attention would be severely torn apart and dispersed, and almost everyone's final cognition and decision would abstract to: When CA, brainlessly rushing.
This will lead to attention hype becoming the core focus, while conspiracy groups adept at manipulating information asymmetry will become the behind-the-scenes manipulators. Over time, most users in the market are forced to lose their holder mentality and become small players sitting still, competing wits with the market makers and living off their youth; meanwhile, the project parties have to face enormous selling pressure from the start of TGE, creating a vicious cycle where TGE becomes the peak. Alas.
How to break the deadlock? To put it simply, there is actually one way: embrace VC institutions to enter the market, support early-stage innovative technologies; attract teams of innovative regular troops to layout and bring real value creation; linearly release chips to extend the project's lifespan; cultivate a community with a long-term perspective, etc.
It sounds simple, but it's not easy to promote; the market needs a long period of natural evolution.
As I said at the beginning, Pump is toxic, but most people are actually unwilling to admit its toxicity and cannot help but take a small sip because it captures human nature's greed, speculation, and profit-seeking.
