Author: Mandy, Azuma
Original Title: One Year Later, What Can the Crypto Market Still Trade?
This weekend, amid internal and external challenges, the crypto market was once again bloodied. BTC is currently hovering around the strategic cost price of $76,000, while altcoins are so dismal that looking at their prices makes one want to poke their eyes out.
Behind the current bleak scene, after recent conversations with projects, funds, and exchanges, one question keeps recurring in my mind: What will the crypto market be trading one year from now?
The more fundamental question behind this is: If the primary market no longer produces "the secondary market of the future," what will the secondary market be trading in a year? How will exchanges change?
Although the death of altcoins has long been a cliché, the market has not been short of projects over the past year. Every day, projects are still queuing up for TGE. As media, we are still frequently coordinating market promotions with project teams.
(Note: In this context, when we say "projects," we mostly refer narrowly to "project teams"—simply put, those benchmarking against Ethereum and the Ethereum ecosystem: underlying infrastructure and various decentralized applications, and specifically "token-issuing projects." This is the cornerstone of so-called native innovation and entrepreneurship in our industry. So, for now, we’ll set aside Memes and platforms emerging from traditional industries entering crypto.)
If we look back a bit further, we’ll discover a fact we’ve all been avoiding: these upcoming TGE projects are "legacy old projects." Most of them raised funds 1–3 years ago and are only now finally reaching token issuance—or, under internal and external pressure, are forced to take this step.
This seems like a kind of "industry inventory clearance," or, to put it more harshly, queuing up to complete their lifecycle: issue the token, give the team and investors closure, and then lie down quietly awaiting death, or spend the money on the books hoping for a miraculous turnaround.
The Primary Market Is Dead
For "old-timers" like us who entered the industry during the ICO era or even earlier, have experienced several bull and bear cycles, and witnessed industry红利 empowering countless individuals, there’s a subconscious belief: given enough time, new cycles, new projects, new narratives, and new TGEs will always emerge.
However, the reality is that we are far from our comfort zone.
Let’s look at the data. Over the recent four-year cycle (2022–2025), excluding special primary market activities such as M&A, IPO, and public fundraising, the number of financing deals in the crypto industry has shown a clear downward trend (1639 ➡️ 1071 ➡️1050➡️829).
The reality is uglier than the data. The change in the primary market is not just an overall shrinkage in amount but a structural collapse.
Over the past four years, the number of early-stage rounds (including angel, pre-seed, and seed rounds), which represent the industry’s fresh blood, has shown a greater decline (825 ➡️ 298, a drop of 63.9%) compared to the overall decrease (49.4%). The primary market’s ability to supply blood to the industry has been shrinking.
The few sectors showing an upward trend in financing deals are financial services, exchanges, asset management, payments, AI, etc., which apply crypto technology but have limited actual relevance to us. Frankly, most of these won’t "issue tokens." In contrast, native "projects" like L1, L2, DeFi, and social have seen a more significant decline in financing.
Odaily Note: Chart sourced from Crypto Fundraising
One easily misinterpreted data point is that while the number of financing deals has drastically reduced, the average amount per deal has increased. The main reason is the "mega projects" mentioned earlier, which have captured large amounts of capital from traditional finance, significantly raising the average. Additionally, mainstream VCs tend to double down on betting on a few "super projects," such as Polymarket’s multiple hundred-million-dollar funding rounds.
From the crypto capital side, this top-heavy vicious cycle is even more pronounced.
Not long ago, an outsider friend asked me about a well-known, super-old crypto fund currently raising capital. After looking at the deck, he asked me in confusion why their returns were "so poor." The table below shows the real data from that deck. I won’t name the fund, but I’ve extracted its fund performance data from 2014–2022.
It’s clear that between 2017 and 2022, this fund’s IRR and DPI changed significantly—the former represents the fund’s annualized return level, reflecting "paper profitability," while the latter represents the multiple of cash returns actually returned to LPs.
Looking at different vintages, this set of fund returns shows a very clear "cycle断层": Funds established between 2014–2017 (Fund I, Fund II, Fund III, Fund IV) significantly outperformed, with TVPI generally in the 6x–40x range, Net IRR maintained at 38%–56%, and also already having a high DPI, indicating that these funds not only had high paper returns but also completed large-scale realizations, eating the era红利 of early crypto infrastructure and top protocols from 0 to 1.
In contrast, funds established after 2020 (Fund V, Fund VI, and the 2022 Opportunity Fund) clearly dropped a grade, with TVPI mostly concentrated in the 1.0x–2.0x range, DPI close to zero or very low, meaning returns mostly still on paper and not converted into real exit profits. This reflects that against the backdrop of valuation inflation, intensified competition, and declining project quality, the primary market can no longer replicate the excess return structure driven by "new narratives + new asset supply."
The real story behind the data is that after the DeFi Summer hype in 2019, valuations for crypto-native protocols in the primary market were inflated. When these projects finally issued tokens two years later, they faced weak narratives, industry tightening, exchanges controlling their fate and临时 modifying terms, etc., generally performing poorly, even with市值倒挂. Investors became the disadvantaged group, and funds found it difficult to exit.
But these周期错配 funds could still create a false appearance of prosperity in parts of the industry, until the真实惨烈 data became直观 apparent during fundraising by some massive star funds in the past two years.
The fund I used as an example currently has an AUM of nearly $3 billion, which further illustrates that it is a mirror of the industry cycle—doing well or not is no longer a matter of individual project selection; the大势已去.
While old牌 funds, though now struggling to raise capital, can still survive, lie flat, eat management fees, or pivot to investing in AI, many more funds have already shut down or turned to secondary markets.
For example, the current "Ethereum Bull King" in the Chinese market, Boss Yi Lihua—who remembers that not long ago he was a representative figure in primary, investing in over a hundred projects annually?
The Alternative to Altcoins Was Never Meme
When we say crypto-native projects are drying up, a counterexample is the explosion of Memes.
Over the past two years, one说法 repeatedly mentioned in the industry is: The alternative to altcoins is Meme.
But looking back now, this conclusion has actually been verified as wrong.
In the early days of the Meme wave, we played Memes the way we played mainstream altcoins—screening a large number of Meme projects for so-called fundamentals, community quality, narrative rationality, trying to find the one that could survive long-term, continuously refresh, and eventually grow into Doge, or even the "next Bitcoin."
But today, if someone still tells you to "hold Meme," you’d think they’ve lost their mind.
Current Memes are a mechanism for the instant monetization of热度: a博弈 of attention and liquidity, products批量 manufactured by Dev and AI tools,
an asset form with an extremely short lifecycle but a continuous supply.
They no longer aim to "survive" but to be seen, traded, and utilized.
Our team also has several long-term, consistently profitable Meme traders. Clearly, they focus not on the project’s future but on rhythm, diffusion speed, sentiment structure, and liquidity paths.
Some say Memes are unplayable now, but in my view, after Trump’s "final割," Meme has truly matured as a new asset form.
Meme was never a substitute for "long-term assets"; it has returned to the essence of attention finance and liquidity博弈. It has become purer, more brutal, and also less suitable for most ordinary traders.
Seeking Solutions Outward
Asset Tokenization
So when Memes become professionalized, Bitcoin becomes institutionalized, altcoins萎靡, new projects are about to断层, what can we ordinary folks who nonetheless enjoy value research, comparative analysis, possess speculative attributes, yet aren’t purely high-frequency probability gamblers, and want sustainable development, actually play?
This question doesn’t just belong to retail.
It also lies before exchanges, market makers, and platforms—after all, the market cannot forever rely on higher leverage and more aggressive contract products to maintain activity.
In fact, as this entire固有 logic begins to collapse, the industry has long started seeking solutions向外.
The direction we are all discussing is repackaging traditional financial assets as on-chain tradable assets.
Stock tokenization, precious metal assets, are becoming the top priority for exchange layouts. From a host of centralized exchanges to the decentralized platform Hyperliquid, this path has been seen as the key to breaking the deadlock, and the market has given positive feedback—during the craziest days for precious metals last week, daily silver trading volume on Hyperliquid once exceeded $1 billion, with tokenized stocks, indices, precious metals, and other assets once occupying half of the top ten trading volume spots, boosting HYPE by 50% short-term under the "full-asset trading" narrative.
Admittedly, some current slogans, such as "providing new choices, low门槛 for traditional investors," are still premature and unrealistic.
But from a crypto-native perspective, it might solve internal problems: after the supply and narratives of native assets slow down, old coins萎靡, new coins断供, what new trading rationale can crypto exchanges still provide to the market?
Tokenized assets are easy for us to pick up. In the past, we researched: public chain ecosystems, protocol revenue, token models, unlock schedules, and narrative space.
Now, the research objects are starting to become: macroeconomic data, financial reports, interest rate expectations, industry cycles, and policy variables. Of course, we’ve already been researching many of these parts.
Essentially, this is a migration of speculative logic, not simply a category expansion.
Listing gold tokens, silver tokens, isn’t just about adding a few more币种; what they are truly trying to introduce are new trading narratives—bringing the volatility and rhythm originally belonging to traditional financial markets into the internal crypto trading system.
Prediction Markets
Besides bringing "external assets" on-chain, another direction is bringing "external uncertainty" on-chain—prediction markets.
According to Dune data, although the crypto market crashed last weekend, prediction market trading activity反而 increased instead of decreasing, with weekly transaction count hitting a new historical high of 26.39 million. Leading Polymarket had 13.34 million transactions, followed closely by Kalshi with 11.88 million.
We won’t elaborate on the development prospects and scale expectations of prediction markets here—Odaily has been writing over two analysis articles on prediction markets daily recently... You can search for them yourself.
I want to talk from the perspective of币圈 users: Why do we play prediction markets? Is it because we are all degenerate gamblers?
Of course.
Actually, for a long time, altcoin traders weren’t本质上 betting on technology but on events: Will it get listed? Is there a partnership announcement? Is it about to issue a token? Is it launching a new feature? Is there a regulatory利好? Can it ride the next narrative wave?
Price is just the result; the event is the starting point.
Prediction markets, for the first time,拆 this matter from an "implied variable in the price curve" into an object that can be directly traded.
You no longer need to buy a token to indirectly bet on whether a certain outcome will happen; you can directly bet on "whether it will happen" itself.
More importantly, prediction markets fit the current environment of "new project断供, narrative scarcity."
When tradable new assets become fewer, market attention反而 concentrates more on macro, regulation, politics, big shot behavior, and major industry nodes.
In other words, the tradable "标的" are decreasing, but the tradable "events" are not减少; they are even increasing.
This is also why the liquidity that has truly emerged in prediction markets in recent years almost entirely comes from non-crypto-native events.
It本质上 introduces the uncertainty of the external world into the internal crypto trading system. From a trading experience perspective, it is also more friendly to original币圈 traders:
The core question is extremely simplified to one—Will this outcome happen? And, is this current probability expensive?
Unlike Meme, the门槛 of prediction markets isn’t execution speed but information judgment and structural understanding.
Hearing this, doesn’t it feel like maybe I can try this too.
Conclusion
Perhaps the so-called币圈 will eventually die out in the not-too-distant future, but before消亡, we are still struggling hard. After "new-coin-driven trading" gradually exits the stage, the market will always need a new, low-participation-barrier, narrative-spreading, sustainable speculative载体.
Or rather, the market won’t disappear; it will only migrate. When the primary market no longer produces the future, what the secondary market can truly trade are these two things—the uncertainty of the external world, and tradable narratives that can be repeatedly重构.
What we can do is perhaps adapt in advance to yet another migration of the speculative paradigm.
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