Rewind to January 17th, just two days before the inauguration of the new pro-crypto US president.

On that day, Trump unexpectedly announced the launch of a crypto MEME coin called $TRUMP through his social media platform Truth Social, without any prior warning.

At lightning speed, $TRUMP ignited the start of the 2025 crypto market, becoming the most bullish celebrity coin ever. Within 24 hours of its launch, it was quickly listed on top exchanges like Coinbase and Binance, with a 24-hour trading volume exceeding $10 billion, more than triple Bitcoin's 24-hour volume.

Besides the conspiracy group, the 24/7 crypto trading frontliners who made the earliest profits on $TRUMP were represented by 0x Sun, who leveraged their years of on-chain data monitoring capabilities to act swiftly. Around 10 minutes after $TRUMP's issuance, 0x Sun started buying, accumulating $600,000 within half an hour at an average cost of only $0.6, netting over $27.5 million in profit.

However, the MEME coin market is a classic zero-sum game, lacking technological innovation, fundamentals, and value creation. It's just a matter of who buys in earlier or later. Not everyone can be as lucky as 0x Sun. As the hype faded and Trump's wife coin was issued, diluting $TRUMP, the price plummeted from a peak of $72 to around $17 currently.

Early data shows a clear normal distribution of profitable addresses, with 560,000 addresses still in the red, and only 300,000 realizing gains.

Even the Offspring Can't Escape Being Trapped

The market is not always friendly to everyone. KOHA is one of the 560,000 trapped investors.

KOHA, a Canadian PhD student in engineering, occasionally invests in US stocks. In 2024, he made a small profit by betting on Trump's re-election and buying stocks in Trump's company DJT in advance. This success made him confident in Trump's business model and led him to believe $TRUMP would have long-term value like DJT stock.

However, the pace of the crypto market is much faster than the stock market.

$TRUMP was launched on a Saturday morning in Beijing time, but late Friday night in the US and Canada time zones. Like many locals who were resting, KOHA did not pay attention to this event immediately. By the time he learned about the $TRUMP launch, the price had already risen to $28.

KOHA tried to buy $TRUMP through the Moonshot platform, but the identity verification and KYC process delayed him, and the price had risen to $30 by the time he succeeded. Nevertheless, he decided to enter the market, believing Trump's second term would be all about making money and doing business, and $TRUMP would be a way to connect with him.

KOHA was not the only investor who believed Trump's business model could be replicated in the crypto market. In fact, many may have seen Trump's $TRUMP issuance as part of his financial strategy, as he has always been excluded from the traditional financial system controlled by Wall Street and the Democratic Jewish capital.

KOHA's understanding of the crypto industry was that it was an "unexpected beneficiary of the rift between two factions of capital." Trump's crypto-friendly policies, such as relaxing regulations and providing a freer trading environment, further reinforced KOHA's belief in $TRUMP as a long-term asset.

As $TRUMP continued to rise, KOHA added more at $40, but by the following Monday, the market had entered the profit-taking phase, and KOHA's coins became trapped liquidity with an average cost of $36.

This Round is a Blatant Gambling Pit

Li Yi was another investor trapped like KOHA.

Unlike the inexperienced KOHA, Li Yi had been navigating the crypto market for a while. Compared to newcomers who didn't even know the major trading platforms, Li Yi at least knew where to trade and that the crypto market logic didn't matter, only emotions did. He followed some self-proclaimed "crypto veterans" in trading groups, buying and selling based on market dynamics.

He did make some money. In the early $TRUMP rally, he sold at $17, profiting from the "follow without wisdom" strategy. However, after making money, he became overconfident.

Instead of cashing out, Li Yi started looking for the "next $TRUMP." True to form, the Trump family didn't disappoint, and $MELANIA, the Melania Trump coin, was issued two days after $TRUMP. Simultaneously, the "family coin" concept began to gain traction in the trading groups.

Without official support, Trump's younger son Barron's name was hyped as the "future president's coin," and there were even rumors of the Trump family's nanny issuing a coin, quickly attracting a wave of capital. Li Yi was one of them, naively believing these coins would skyrocket like $TRUMP.

But the market didn't give him a second chance.

The rest of the family coins quickly went to zero, Li Yi's principal was trapped, and his profits evaporated instantly. Currently, he is starting to inquire about how to buy World Liberty Financial (WLFI, the Trump family's decentralized finance project), trying to recoup his losses through a new speculative project. "I'll take another gamble, WLFI might be able to continue the legitimacy of the Trump coin," Li Yi said.

The biggest change in this cycle is that everyone has shown their cards.

No more packaging, no more pretending to be a project with technological innovation, and no need to spend $5,000 to hire a ghostwriter to write a high-end English white paper and pile up a bunch of obscure new concepts.

The gameplay of this bull market is simple and brutal - directly hype emotions, celebrities, topics, and cognitive differences. Utilizing the FOMO sentiment, a series of Altcoins are manufactured, and the fantasies of new investors are exploited for harvesting.

In the past, the project factories of new chains would still do a little bit of work, disguising themselves as seemingly innovative projects. Reviewing the initial launch of BSC, Aptos, and Arbitrum, the market has experienced the same scene - a swarm of anonymous "innovative project factories" taking advantage of the new chain effect to harvest TVL and users, and once the market heat subsides, they directly shut down the community and website, and disappear with the funds without a trace.

Behind these projects are often familiar faces, who just change their disguise, modify a few codes, and become the new popular coins. They were the first batch of popular projects on a new public chain at the beginning, anonymous, mysterious, without well-known investors backing them up, and without big company audits, but they could always be hyped by KOLs, relying on the community's FOMO sentiment to create one wave of wealth myth after another.

But now, the market seems to have reached another consensus: this is a new gambling table, a game of wealth transfer.

No one talks about "technological revolution" anymore, no one talks about "changing the world" anymore, everyone tacitly understands - if you lose this round, just wait for the next round of gambling, you come if you are willing to bet and accept the loss, the crypto, is just for this purpose. Apparently, even the small guys in the Hangzhou nightclub know to short Altcoins now.

And Li Yi, is just another participant in this wealth transfer game.

Are the short-sellers the winners?

Among the new crypto entrants from the Trump coin, the only one who made money and left was Professor L.

In the storm of the $TRUMP coin, most people were betting on the upside, desperately rushing to the top, and ended up being trapped at the high point. However, some people chose the opposite direction - short, and successfully profited against the market frenzy.

Professor L, a finance professor and a veteran futures trader, has long studied market structure and knows that the price volatility of cryptocurrencies is much more violent than the traditional financial market. As a MEME coin, $TRUMP has no fundamental support, relying entirely on market sentiment to drive it, which means it is likely to plummet after a short-term surge.

But his trading strategy was not simply betting on the market decline, but a basic "hedging" strategy in futures trading:

He bought $50,000 worth of spot to ensure he wouldn't miss out on the upside profits. Meanwhile, he used $10,000 to short the $TRUMP contract 5 times as a risk hedge. If $TRUMP continued to rise, his spot gains could cover the contract losses. If $TRUMP crashed, his short position could offset the losses and even bring excess returns.

Professor L does not agree with the gambling-style leveraged trading of many retail investors. "The essence of the contract is to diversify risk, not to amplify returns." But most people don't understand this principle.

At the same time, Professor L strongly agrees with Peter Lynch's view: "The big money shorting does not short at the highest point, but waits until the market is halved, when the retail investors say the decline is over and start to buy the dips, that's when the shorting money likes to short." This is precisely why Professor L chose to short in the rapid decline of $TRUMP after its frantic surge, without rushing to close his short position.

In the crypto groups, there are always people boasting about their high-leverage trading achievements: "I opened a 50x short position today and made $2,000!" "My long position was liquidated yesterday, but my short position made it back today!" But the fact is, this strategy is ultimately gambling.

Professor L's success contrasts sharply with those blind high-leverage gamblers. The violent market fluctuations, combined with high leverage, only need one reverse trend to instantly wipe out the account. Many retail investors went crazy with leverage longs at the $TRUMP peak, fantasizing about the price continuing to surge, only to be counterattacked by the market and directly liquidated to zero.

In the end, when the $TRUMP price retreated from its high point, Professor L's hedging strategy allowed him to profit steadily. He didn't get the dividends like 0x Sun by speed, nor was he trapped like Li Yi in the FOMO sentiment, but relied on rational risk management to survive and make stable profits in the extreme market conditions of the crypto world.

How many pits do new entrants have to step into in the crypto world?

In this Trump coin frenzy, not only the inexperienced newbies entered, but also many old players from the traditional investment market. They have been through the battles in the A-share market, commodity futures, and even the tea leaf speculation market, witnessing various capital games.

Professor L was lucky, but not all veterans can replicate their past success in the crypto world. In other words, they have to step into many pits before they can officially start trading.

"The A-share bull is short, the bear is long, and the small-cap speculation is the way to survive." This is the consensus of many domestic stock investors, including the "Cake Brother".

Long-term, the speculative style of the A-share market has made him accustomed to short-term wave operations, low-price stock picking, and gambling on market sentiment.

When the Cake Brother saw a coin like $TRUMP with a strong speculative concept, he immediately felt a familiar feeling - "Isn't this just a small-cap stock with high control?" So he decided to "take a gamble".

The Cake Brother, who bought more than 4,000 RMB worth of $TRUMP at the high of $69, tried to calculate the possibility of breaking even. As the coin price kept falling, during the interview with BlockBeats, the $TRUMP price was $26 per coin, which means if it goes up 5%, he needs to add another 50,000 RMB to lower the cost price. But he knows this is just a "peasant fantasy".

After being trapped, the Cake Brother realized that the rules of the crypto world are much more cruel than the A-share market: "No price limits, capital inflow and outflow are completely chaotic, the big players can instantly wash the market; no regulation, market makers can drain liquidity at any time and manipulate the market at will; no time window, 24-hour trading, the market never rests, retail investors don't even have a chance to catch their breath." The Cake Brother, with some emotions, wished he could rant for three days and three nights.

Many investors who are used to the A-share short-term strategy not only failed to make money in $TRUMP, but also lost their principal by repeatedly entering and exiting in an attempt to ride the waves.

But the crypto world is a place that eats people without spitting out the bones. After overcoming the culture shock between traditional stock trading and crypto trading, the Cake Brother found himself stepping into another pit.

"I felt there was no hope of breaking even, so I was ready to cut my losses, but then I found out I had bought fake coins," before the $TRUMP was even listed on the trading platform, the Cake Brother followed the operations of the big guys in the trading group and bought the first batch of $TRUMP through a web3 wallet on a certain platform.

Because he had never used a web3 wallet before, he had always been looking at the prices in the group, and after buying, he didn't actively check again until he was about to sell, and he found that his money had never actually entered the real market, but had been swallowed by a "fake coin contract" deployed by hackers.

And this is still a relatively simple way for the crypto circle to harvest the "leek". After this, there will be more pits waiting for the "Subi Brother".

The uneven crypto trading paid discussion group is like a frog in boiling water. It starts out free, using the beautiful photos of some female bloggers, screenshots of making money or photos of buying cars and houses to attract traffic, and the big brothers in the group will enthusiastically teach the newcomers how to open an account on the trading platform and how to trade, and at this step the big brothers can receive a tuition fee through the platform's referral commission.

Using retail investors' funds to chase orders and pay fees is still considered good, the most direct one is to lead the order to harvest the "leek". Claiming to have "accurate inside information", but in fact it is a well-designed harvesting scheme. Another common scam on Xiaohongshu now is the so-called "quantitative robot trading strategy", claiming a monthly return of 30%.

However, the crypto circle is a completely different world. The game here is a high-frequency confrontation measured in "seconds", and every second missed could mean huge losses. Worse, many veteran players, with their strong capital, often adopt the strategy of "large capital re-betting", but end up becoming the "targets" at the "top" of the market. Those big market makers who control the market have already prepared before these "big fish" enter the market, waiting for them to take the bait and quickly absorb their funds.

In this smokeless PVP battle, the flow of funds and the control of the market are always in the hands of a few people. For those players who are still stuck in the traditional market mindset, the rules of the crypto circle often catch them off guard. Because here, risks and opportunities coexist, but more often, it is risks.

When these veteran players come to their senses, they find that not only have they not made a fortune in the crypto circle through years of experience, but they have become the typical "harvested upon entry". The experience rules they were once accustomed to have become useless in the face of this brand new market,

and these are the tuition fees they must pay when entering this industry.