I woke up in the morning and found that I was completely back to zero. In the past period of time, I have been buying the bottom every day and covering my positions every day. Everyone said that "the real bull market is still behind", and I believed it until I received the last message of liquidation today.

The wallet is the same, with less than $500 left. I have just entered the circle for less than a year. I was very happy to make money in March and April. At the peak, my assets were 50 times that when I entered the circle. As a fresh graduate, I earned the money that my classmates could only earn in several years in three months. At that time, I felt very superior, but today the market educated me.

When I first opened Binance this morning, I thought they changed the watchlist to the homepage display, but later I found out that this was the gain list. This is the first time I have seen the red Binance gain list since I entered the circle. I never thought that it was a skill to fall less.

Recently, everyone has been saying that this round of bull market is "hell-level difficult". At every dinner I have eaten this year, I basically heard people complain to me that it is too difficult, whether it is retail investors, VCs or project parties.

After calming down, I have been looking back on the past six months, from DePIN zeroing to AI falsification to meme PVP, from the death of inscriptions to the death of VC coins to the death of Mao, it seems that it is not only me and my friends who have difficulty making money, but most people in the industry have difficulty making money.

ETF is the last bite of heroin

When the Bitcoin spot ETF was passed half a year ago, everyone felt that the violent bull market was coming. At that time, a colleague told me that he felt that this bull market was very twisted. He didn't see any interesting innovations and narratives in the industry, but a lot of people were shouting for a crypto revolution. Now it seems that he was right.

Looking back, the cryptocurrency circle at that time was like taking heroin, and ETF was the last bite.

After communicating with peers in the past six months, since a series of industry institutions broke out last year, the cryptocurrency circle has become open-minded about the words "plate" and "Ponzi" and has begun to completely embrace scams. Once I had dinner with a VC friend, he half-jokingly told me that "now calling a project Ponzi is a compliment", but after thinking about it carefully, I found that it was indeed the truth.

It is obvious that projects and institutions such as LUNA, Sanjian, and FTX have set a very bad example for people in the circle. Now everyone thinks that the more you are a Ponzi scheme, the more leveraged you are, the faster you will rise, and most institutions and retail investors don’t care about the bullshit value of blockchain. They just want to turn their $5,000 into $50 million in a month.

So everyone is complaining about the lack of new narratives. I don’t think so. As a newcomer to the circle, I can at least feel that there are many new things in this industry in the first few months, whether it is inscriptions, AI or meme, and I am refreshing my cognition every day. It’s just that after communicating with more peers later, I realized that many of these so-called new concepts are actually new wine in old bottles.

Therefore, I have formed a worldview for this industry. This circle doesn’t care about innovation. New narratives are just people who psychedelic others and themselves, taking a mouthful of heroin. When they are out of energy, they take a mouthful, but after the drug addiction, all that is left is pain and confusion.

Think about it, really think about it, which narrative of this cycle is not like this? Take Inscription for example. It was accused of plagiarizing ERC20 in March last year, and then it skyrocketed in May and was pulled into OKX. Finally, at the end of the year, VC institutions and public chains directly entered the market and threw a lot of money inexplicably, and then this thing changed from "plagiarizing local dog" to "golden shovel". But in fact, everyone knows it in their hearts. This thing is garbage.

After taking Inscription heroin, everyone realized again, "Oh! It turns out that the new token standard is innovation, which is the next hundred times!", so Analysoor on Solana changed from Inscription to Shovel and then to (ZERO, ONE), and then a NUTS that can't do anything because it changed from a picture to a coin, the price doubled 10 times in one day, which then triggered a series of 404 picture-text conversions.

Also AI, I have been thinking about it these two days. In fact, the logic is that AI is the hottest in the US stock market and venture capital circles. There is no other reason. You will find that the most aggressive one is the meme coin $GPU, whose logo and name imitate Nvidia. Once I talked with the founder of an AI project invested by a large exchange. His project was to do decentralized large model aggregation. At that time, he clearly told me that this decentralized approach could not beat the giant AI. I asked why he still wanted to do it. He replied, "But I think I can still try it." I was very impressed. This is the funniest thing. Everyone knows that decentralized AI is bullshit. I didn't expect that everyone from entrepreneurs to VCs to exchanges pretended to be so serious. From IO to ATH, it was all a huge waste of resources. In the end, Amazon became the big winner.

I don’t know what it was like before, but at least since I entered the circle, the cryptocurrency circle has given me the feeling of a crocodile farm, where everyone is waiting for liquidity to come and then take a big bite of meat. But everyone has taken out their money, but found that there is nothing new, so they can only attract fans one by one, hoping that ETF liquidity will save themselves, but it turns out that ETF is actually the last mouthful of heroin they wash. There is no liquidity in the market, and no one can save you.

After the drug addiction, everyone sobered up, and then the expected bull market became the most tragic PVP battlefield in the history of the cryptocurrency circle. Everyone had nothing to speculate, and finally chose meme entertainment to death. The frequency of cryptocurrency speculation changed from one year to one month and finally to one day, the doubling time of the coin price changed from one week to one day and finally to one hour, the market value of the plate also changed from hundreds of millions of dollars to millions of dollars and finally to tens of thousands of dollars, and the motto of cryptocurrency speculation changed from "diamond hands" to "no pattern". Without heroin, everyone is running wild.

Valuecoins are cutting me the hardest, but VCs are not having a good time either

Before, there was another phenomenon that was criticized a lot, which was "high FDV and low market value". For a while, I also criticized it very harshly, because I found that I didn't know what logic to use to analyze and make money. Every day, I wrote seemingly reasonable and well-founded in-depth analysis, but in fact, after one or two o'clock in the morning, the soul of a gambler was fully revealed. It is becoming increasingly difficult for me to find a legitimate reason for this high valuation, and I am increasingly unconvinced by what I say. I feel that I am helping the evil, helping institutions to cut the leeks of newcomers, and finally cutting myself together.

I read Cobie's article before, and I think he is right. The value discovery of all tokens/projects/opportunities has been completed in the primary market, resulting in no one to take over the secondary market. Some time ago, I had coffee with a friend who is a top VC in China. He told me a case: a small project doing ZK privacy infrastructure was valued at 5 million on the opening day of the event, and the next day it was re-financed at a valuation of 20 million. It's not that there is no increase, it's just that you can't see it. It's not that there is no opportunity, it's just that you are not qualified.

Last month, I was chatting and debating with a colleague. He said that the first coin worth hundreds of millions of dollars to rise at the beginning of the bull market was TIA, the leader of the sector and a true VC coin. However, after a large-scale airdrop, it rose from 2 dollars to 17 dollars, and was even said to be "new (3, 3)" and "the best profit strategy in this round of bull market." There are also SOL, TON, ENA, NOT, all of them are like this, with large market capitalization, but they just keep rising.

I didn’t know how to refute it at the time. In fact, I even summarized a logic for myself before, that is, this round of cycle should play with “strong banker coins”. They have a pattern and they have ideals. It was not until I saw the trend of these “strong banker coins” recently that I realized that talking about pattern without liquidity is like talking about love without money.

The most popular multi-chain narratives have fallen so much that even mothers can’t recognize them

In fact, one of the benefits of being in the media is that sometimes you can sense that there are promoters behind some narratives. For example, in April and May last year, there were suddenly more articles on the website about “SOL’s new opportunities”. I was wondering at the time, are these people all pumped? Later, when the price rose to 40 or 50 dollars, I learned that there were many OTC transactions behind it.

The same is true for TON. After the TON Foundation linked Telegram on Token2049, a series of submissions came in, and various ecological projects took the initiative to come to interview. Later, a former Alibaba friend also showed a firm optimistic mood when chatting with me. All these are actually "signals" that I ignored, and now it's too late for me to regret.

However, even if it is a strong dealer, it will be a pain in the ass when there is no liquidity. I still remember clearly that when I saw Twitter, there were Protestants who resolutely re-SOL at a high of $190. When people finally had a new consensus and belief, the rise came to the "last stick" link. Now, TIA, ENA, NOT, which one is not like this?

But on the other hand, VCs and market makers are also in a difficult situation. They have a certain size and KPI, and the funds must be deployed. There is really no other way. Today, I saw an article by ChainCatcher interviewing VCs. Sometimes they are also big losers. In order to make narratives or chase hot spots, they pay for the valuation to the sky, and finally find that retail investors don’t buy it. A bunch of coins in their hands are also trapped by various lock-ups, leaving only "paper wealth".

Many VC friends gave me feedback on the issue of exit, which can be summed up in two words: anxiety. Although the investment on the books has a return of two or three times, everyone knows that after their shares are unlocked, the price will definitely not be the same as it is now. In addition, the market liquidity is still drying up, so we have to find some way to recover the losses. According to my personal understanding, many VCs have started to lock up their own positions in the OTC market recently. In the past, a 30% or 80% discount was enough, but now it is directly 20% or 30% discount, and the main focus is to save lives.

My personal opinion on this matter is really pessimistic, that is, a group of VCs will have to die. Because if the market starts to improve from here, these VCs with super high risk appetite and super low industry responsibility and the bags in their hands will survive, then no one will receive any education, and the problems that have erupted now will erupt again in the future. What is the difference between us and Wall Street?

I sympathize with those VC friends who are struggling in the "hell difficulty", but the situation may be even worse.

So what's the problem?

I chatted with a friend who was born in the 2000s a while ago. He started to speculate in cryptocurrencies in 2020. Now he has withdrawn all the money he earned, and then borrowed a lot of Japanese yen to buy US bonds. Now the interest rate spread can be several thousand dollars a month. He said that he can lie flat until 2030. I understood it as soon as I heard it. Now, all rich people seem to be playing this blood-sucking game. How can there be money in the market? That conversation was the first time I really felt the real impact of interest rate hikes on the currency circle. I used to think that interest rate cuts were just expectations, but now I think that interest rate cuts can prolong life.

Speaking of the industry itself, I often discuss with our deputy editor whether this industry is a scam. There is one point that he often defends VCs. His logic is: the explosion of applications in the last cycle caused the public chain to be overloaded, so the attention of capital began to turn to infrastructure, but the infrastructure does not directly contact the user end, which makes retail investors feel that there is no narrative. He always tells me that this industry is still valuable and innovative, such as DeFi and NFT.

Okay, I also admit that they are valuable, but since they are valuable, why doesn't anyone continue to innovate in these things? Why choose to abandon the successful narratives of the past and weave new lies? I think the cryptocurrency world is now in the worst existential crisis in history, that is, everyone realizes that although blockchain or Web3 has many promising applications, everyone seems unwilling to admit that the current user profile of this industry is gambling dogs.

I interviewed an AI entrepreneur two days ago. Although they are doing an AI model distillation platform, the actual product is AI astrology. His explanation is: serve your real users first, and then think about other things after surviving. I think the cryptocurrency world is actually the same. The success of Uniswap has made us misjudge the development of the industry. When you think about it carefully, you will find that Uniswap is just a reserved version of pump.fun. Maybe we should also return to the essence and serve the current real users well. But what do I know? I am just a little leek who has just entered the circle and returned to zero soon.

Okay, I'm done complaining. Thank you for wasting your time to read this.

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