Actually, saying that the cryptocurrency industry is at its end is a bit of an exaggeration. Indeed, as the author said, the ETFs we had been hoping for have been approved, DeFi has been adopted by mainstream institutions, MEME has broken out of its niche, and stablecoins are still growing on a large scale. While the macro environment appears prosperous and thriving, the actual market sentiment is one of bitter winter. Why? 1) The fat protocol theory has failed. We used to believe in the fat protocol theory, thinking that the underlying Layer 1 public chains would capture the greatest value. However, it turns out that Layer 2 and Layer 3 public chains are still playing the game of massive infrastructure development, and the actual transaction volume generated by real-world applications is simply insufficient to be fed back to the underlying protocol through Tokenomics. In other words, the business is running, but the value isn't being deposited in the tokens; 2) ETFs have brought in institutional funds, but they have also disrupted the logic of fund rotation. The approval of ETFs has turned assets such as BTC and ETH into closed assets in the allocation of Wall Street institutions. This means that they will no longer spill over into the DeFi and Altcoin markets to form sector rotation as before. The original linkage logic of BTC taking the lead and altcoins taking the scraps seems to have been severed, resulting in the more successful mainstream assets such as BTC are, the more desolate the native Crypto Altcoin market becomes. 3) DeFi and MEME are caught in a binary opposition and involution. The adoption of DeFi by institutions and the continued practical application of the RWA narrative are all good things, but relying on on-chain mapping of traditional finance cannot provide a sustainable source of revenue for the native Crypto industry. Meanwhile, the popularity of MEME remains a zero-sum game; the PVP-driven competition not only fails to address the lack of new applications but also pushes the industry into a narrow, dead-end situation. Ultimately, I don't think the Crypto industry is failing; it's just that the era of rampant growth characterized by "mindless riches for individual investors" and "low-barrier entrepreneurship for makeshift teams" is over.

It's basically just a change in gameplay.

The game experience was terrible 🤣