2. In the short term, there is no momentum for a reversal in the secondary market trend, but I am still optimistic about the policy shift in the US, and I am generally optimistic about the price trend in the second half of the year.

3. Some are happy, some are sad. Projects that have already raised a lot of money or successfully launched are secretly happy, taking advantage of the low prices to accumulate; star projects that have not yet launched are collectively postponing their TGE plans by 3 months, and many middle-tier projects are running out of runway.

4. VC returns are not ideal, and many crypto VCs have not made any moves for a long time; well-funded traditional funds' crypto arms are still investing, but are moving more towards the institutional side, such as B2B payments, banking, and a more Fintech-like logic.

5. Traditional internet and entertainment companies like Meta and Ubisoft have disappeared, replaced by payment and financial companies like PayPal and Franklin Templeton. No one mentions the word "Web3" anymore, and the idealistic believers attracted by the grand narrative have come back to their senses.

6. The grand narrative is lacking in power, and practitioners are suspicious of the most common business model of "storytelling, asset creation, and dumping on retail investors", but due to path dependence, they don't know what to do.

- Launching chains is still the primary productivity, no matter what you do, the ultimate goal is to launch chains, but the so-called ecosystem building has returned to hosting hackathons and distributing grants, replicating the DeFi trinity.

-The BTC ecosystem has cooled down a lot, and it's still the same old gang, essentially trying to replicate the split-pool model that was successful on ETH/SOL, finding yield scenarios for BTC, such as lending, staking, stablecoins, LPs, etc., but the whales are unwilling to compromise security for these meager returns, so progress is slow.

-ETH doesn't seem to know what it's up to, the main stage is filled with advertising booths for other Alt-L1s, #ZK, #Rollup, #reStaking, but no new direction can be found.

7. New directions I've seen:

- AI: The hottest topic, with all kinds of vertical AI Agents and developer tools popping up, but few have real technical barriers or use cases, most people are optimistic but don't know how to get started, this topic is very big and deserves a separate discussion.

- BTCFi: After the withdrawal of SAB121, US banks can now freely custody cryptocurrencies, with banks custodying BTC and then bridging it to different chains, earning yields on-chain and off-chain without worrying about theft, if it succeeds, it will be a huge injection of on-chain liquidity.

- RWA: T-Bill on-chain is already quite mature, the key to on-chaining off-chain assets is standardization, mature custody solutions, large market size, and preferably an inactive off-chain market, some new emerging assets are being explored, such as alternative asset classes like uranium.

- Preconfirmation: A new exploration by Ethereum, a futures market for block space, currently all transactions on-chain are spot market, with many issues like gas fee volatility and long waiting times; preconf is to pre-sell block space, which is also a solution that will be needed for future Based Rollup to reduce costs and increase speed.

- InfoFi/AttentionFi: Competitors to Kaito, since the current main business model is still token issuance and dumping on retail, the most important thing is actually sales, the market access channels for a new token are still very primitive, basically controlled by big VCs, core circles, and KOLs; it can be understood as the productization of a Marketing Agency, how to design a mechanism to get people to become your sales force voluntarily.
- DeFi/Trading Tools: More about optimizing the experience, fast on-chain, anti-sandwich, trading signals, chip analysis, etc.

Overall, although many people are again disappointed by the lack of real-world use cases in Crypto, I am still very optimistic; in the past, the real money in this industry was basically concentrated at the head and tail of the assets, as well as the various extraction points in between:

- Asset issuance: Miners, top-tier VC syndicates, leading project teams, token issuance groups, Launchpads, market makers, secondary institutions, stablecoin issuers; the core is the ability to create buying power through money, stories or influence.
- Asset trading: Exchanges, public chains, DeFi, trading tools; the core is product power and capturing the latest market trends.

- Asset circulation extraction: KOLs, MKT Agencies, payments; the core is information asymmetry and channel reach.

The loss of the idealistic community is not so much due to the gap between the vision (the next generation of the internet) and the current reality (a casino/lottery/money laundering), but rather that the means of asset creation are no longer sufficient in the new cycle. At the same same price, why would retail investors buy a basic infrastructure coin that no one uses, rather than something everyone recognizes like Trump? If the stories told and the products built are still targeting the existing Crypto user base, even the dumbest people will eventually wake up after being fleeced for too long.

Looking back at the new directions above, you can see that the industry's fundamentals are continuing to improve:

- Asset issuance -> Sexier stories / More diverse assets / More badass issuers: AI, BTCFi, RWA, Preconfirmation.

- Asset trading -> Better products: DeFi/Trading Tools.

- Asset circulation extraction -> Stronger channel reach: Payments, banks, InfoFi/AttentionFi.

Pandora's box has been opened, and nothing can stand in the way of this madness.