Original author: flowie, ChainCatcher
Original editor: TB, ChainCatcher
If you are still looking forward to altcoins, then you may lose some of your fantasies after seeing this set of data.
According to the dune panel data statistics created by @cgrogan, the number of crypto tokens has increased from more than 3.4 million in 2022 to more than 39 million in 2025. In 2024 and 2023, the crypto market created more than 10.09 million and more than 18.7 million tokens each year, respectively.
In sharp contrast to the explosive growth of altcoins in this bull market, the number of cryptocurrency developers has decreased instead of increased. Electric Capitals Cryptocurrency Developer Report shows that the total number of crypto developers fell by 7% and 24% in 2024 and 2023, respectively.
The crypto market has long and openly become a huge coin issuance factory. Apart from the innovation of coin issuance models and casinos, it is basically difficult to see new paradigm innovations here.
The flip side of fairness and getting rich overnight is the extremely low cost of committing evil and a large number of ordinary users who have been defrauded. In long-term PvP, all important participants, including users, are educated to be smart short-termists.
Leave or wait for the transfer
Yesterday, the Crypto Fear and Greed Index fell to 10, the lowest level since June 2022. @ZKSgu refuted Cryptos cry of externalities, saying, No one in the market can stay.
Exchanges and VCs, as the most criticized participants in this bull market, are looking for opportunities to exit or are being forced to leave.
The established crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX is seeking to be sold. According to people familiar with the matter who revealed to ChainCatcher, the largest crypto options exchange Deribit may have completed a merger and acquisition agreement, and the merger and acquisition amount may be as high as US$5 billion.
Not only exchanges, but the entire crypto field is experiencing a wave of mergers and acquisitions. According to RootData data, in the two months from 2025 to now, there have been more than 20 mergers and acquisitions in the crypto field, with an average of more than 10 crypto mergers and acquisitions per month.
A large number of VCs are facing elimination. YettaSs biggest feeling at Consensus HK was that VCs were in great distress: some VCs could not raise the next round of funds, some VCs lost half of their staff, some VCs turned to strategic investments instead of independent investments, and some VCs even considered posting memes to raise funds.
Investor @ 26 x 14 eth began to call on young people not to spend their most precious time on gold rush in the cryptocurrency circle, but to intern in the promising AI and robotics industries if they have the opportunity. Because this is not the period of 2017-2021 when everyone can make money, the most precious wealth at present is time.
But some people are waiting for a turnaround. Crypto KOL @cmdefi is not so pessimistic. He feels that the current market is like 2018-2019, when the ICO bubble burst and everyone felt that there was no hope for this market and it was all a scam.
“But DeFi Summer is here in 2020, speculative funds are decreasing, and the market is more focused on application innovation. Stay in the game.”
Assembly line coin making is a blood-sucking business
This bull market is indeed hellishly difficult.
There are almost no surprising crypto constructions. From Trump’s “harvesting” of celebrity coins, Pi coin’s listing on a major exchange, to the recent hacking of Safe, everyone has just woken up from their dreams and realized that the encryption system is so absurd and vulnerable.
The current state of the crypto ecosystem described by overseas KOL @sherlock resonated with the market. Apart from the shaky crypto construction, conspiracy groups can be seen everywhere.
In this bull market, it is even harder to make money.
Players who have experienced the baptism of the last bull market may be particularly painful. Binance and other places that created the myth of wealth in the last round have become dumping grounds for the project partys big Dogecoin holders. The so-called alpha listing is the peak. Presto Research counted the tokens launched on Binance in the first month of 2025, and 100% of them fell by more than 70%.
If you hold a beta diamond in the top 20 by market value, you will no longer be rewarded. Since July 2024, the top 20 tokens by market value have generally fallen by more than 60%. The Mao Mao Party also lamented that it is still difficult to escape the reverse pull no matter how much it is rolled and upgraded.
The seemingly fairer on-chain PVP is a mess.
As of February 26, the number of tokens issued by the Pump.fun platform exceeded 8.1 million, the number of Meme coins with a market value of more than $100 million was nearly 32, and the number of Meme coins with a market value of more than $10 million was only 154. Now, after the scandals of celebrity coins such as Libra, on-chain PVP has also come to an end.
Without actual crypto construction, most people can’t make money, so where does the money go?
Conflux co-founder Yuanjie may have told the truth. Except for a very small number of smart and lucky people, most of the money went to various stakeholders of the assembly line coin issuance.
Yuanjie shared on Twitter, The coin factory includes not only VCs, serial entrepreneurs, market makers, OL agencies, studios, big investors, and exchanges, but also a complete assembly line that greedily sucks the industry and the leeks like a vampire.
In the crypto market, minting and selling coins is the biggest business model.
In Yuanjies opinion, under the coin factory model, the wealth creation process of the project party is mainly concentrated in the two core links of chip allocation and listing. The model of coin issuance in this assembly line is:
Find the founders endorsed by the core circle (such as Vitalik, A16Z, Binance, etc.) or the meme leaders with great influence to take the low-priced chips
Fabricate beautiful narratives and use artificial data (TVL, on-chain data, node size, etc.)
Interest-bound Kol Group completes Twitter Shilling (promotion)
Hunting down the key decision-makers who influence the stock exchange (how to) complete the final push
After listing, dumping begins through market makers, and the above steps are repeated to prepare the next project.
An investor in Web2 and Web3 also told ChainCatcher that because there is no RD investment and the team does not need to support a few people, as long as the listing is completed and the harvest is harvested, the market elimination mechanism has completely failed, and junk projects and tokens are constantly increasing.
But when ordinary users are no longer easily fooled by the narrative routines of the project owners and VCs, the more brutal meme coin-making model has come on the scene. The methodology is exactly the same, but without the VCs.
Behind the fair issuance of coins with almost no threshold is the extremely low cost of committing evil. @YettaSing, investment partner of Primitive Crypto, believes that the Meme model is essentially a darker on-chain world than the VC model. Due to the lack of product and technical support, absolute fairness is often just a cover. The scandals of celebrity coins such as Libra have revealed the last fig leaf of meme.
Where should the first shot of change be fired?
The wealth effect has failed everywhere, and the industry has begun to collectively reflect and hold accountable.
Recently, public opinion has once again attacked Lumao Studio. Crypto kol @mscryptojiayi believes that the altcoins cannot hold their heads up, and it can be traced back to the moment when the bribery system prevailed. The first shot of industry reform will be fired at Lumao Studio.
In her opinion, the studio and the project party conspired to create a false prosperity in the industry, which not only diluted the expected returns of ordinary users and weakened users long-term loyalty to the project, causing the community to degenerate from a value community to a profit trading market, but also laid mines for secondary market crashes.
She criticized that there are even many studios that have no bottom line and collude with fraudulent projects, engaging in shameless acts of jointly building insider trading and deceiving exchanges and users.
But IceFrog 666666, a KOL in the airdrop track, refuted this. He believed that false prosperity was the result of the distorted development of the industry, but not the cause. The studio is not the biggest vested interest and rule maker. If the knife is not cut at the biggest vested interest and rule maker, the reform is doomed to be ineffective.
In addition to the LuMao studio, this round of bull market is considered to be a conspiracy with the project party to gain two major vested interests. VC and CEX have been the targets of siege many times.
During the Hong Kong Consensus Conference, a Crypto VC even criticized the chaos of junk coins, saying that 90% of VCs should close down.
The rise of VC coins also stems from the fact that there are too many crypto scams after ICO. After VC screening and endorsement, projects are gradually recognized by retail investors.
It’s just that the leader of this retail investor has lost trust. Retail investors believe that VCs can obtain chips at a lower cost and have information advantages, and they conspire with project owners to dump tokens and harvest users.
In this round of bull market, VC coins are generally overvalued and under-circulated, which causes a crash as soon as they are listed, and is also the source of dissatisfaction among community users.
He Yi also responded to the controversy over coin listings in last year’s AMA, saying bluntly that “some VCs are indeed the core reason for the inflated prices.”
The ones who get hurt are always ordinary retail investors.
As the most powerful link in wealth creation, exchanges are naturally considered to be to blame by the market.
Binance, Coinbase and other mainstream exchanges have been frequently besieged by controversy over listings in the past year. Moonrock Capital CEO Simon once regarded CEX’s sky-high listing fees as the biggest reason for project owners’ inability to afford it and the loss of market liquidity.
Although He Yi later denied the sky-high listing fees, CEXs listing mechanism and girlfriend group insider trading have always been questioned as one of the culprits for the bloodsucking of junk projects.
Although He Yi has repeatedly stated that Binance has a transparent and complex coin listing process, the meme TST on the BNB chain was quickly launched recently and immediately crashed the market. Even Zhao Changpeng began to question Binances coin listing issues.
Not only exchanges and VCs, but almost any beneficiary in the coin issuing factory can be revolutionized. Crypto kol @CyberPhilos believes that the three major termites in the Crypto world, in addition to CEX, are KOL Agency and market makers.
A common view is that the important participants in this bull market are too path-dependent and lack sufficient original innovation. Without new external liquidity entering the market, everything fails. But is this a result or a cause? Why can every party in the chain become a worm?
Overseas kol Murtaza reflected, Wealth comes long before practicality. Its not just a small mistake that will solve itself over time. It actually poses a fatal threat to technology realizing its potential.
Murtaza mentioned that the global cryptocurrency industry has a market value of more than $2 trillion. Usually, industries of this size are formed after something useful to society has been developed.
Cypher Capital co-founder Bill and Nothing Research partner @0x_Todd have similar views when reflecting on the predicament of VCs and exchanges.
Bill said that Web3 venture capital and Web2 venture capital follow completely different logics. The former emphasizes that early fame is the key. The model of rapid wealth creation prompts founders to chase trends, focus on marketing and quickly list on exchanges.
In Bills view, Web3 actually needs more patient capital - venture capital that adopts a Web2-style approach and supports founders in building long-term value in major markets, so that teams can focus on product development rather than rushing to cash out.
The dilemma of CEX listing may also stem from the premature cashing out of the wealth of the project party. @0x_Todd believes that compared with the public offering of the traditional Web2 market, the problem with the Crypto protocol is that it enjoys the benefits of traditional listing: investors exit/motivate employees, but does not bear any traditional listing obligations.
The lack of crypto regulation is also the crux of the problem. @0x_Todd said that all tricks such as bribery, fraud, volume manipulation, and deception should be used because there will be no punishment.
Currently, the crypto panic has reached an extreme point. Although everyone is holding themselves accountable and reflecting, they are collectively trapped. It is still unknown whether the industry can really scrape the bone to heal the wound and usher in the time of clearing.
