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I have repeatedly thought about one thing: after experiencing the deep involvement of Wall Street and institutional funds in this cycle, many of the existing logic and thinking in the crypto world have been forced to be rewritten.
The so-called "Altcoin Season" that was once supported by narrative rotations and capital games,
was fundamentally built on a market with low efficiency and dominated by retail investors.
But as the capital structure begins to shift, with institutional funds focusing on risk control, fundamentals, and sustainability as core entry criteria, the function of Altcoin Season also changes.
It is no longer a frenzy of widespread price increases, but more like a filtering mechanism that accelerates the淘汰 of air coins.
In this environment, projects can no longer survive solely on narratives,
but must also consider practicality, retention capability, and genuine demand.
In fact, this is one of the core issues that the crypto industry has been unable to突破 for over a decade.
Besides exchanges and DeFi, why has there never been a truly large-scale popularization or a long-term surviving killer app?
The reason is not complicated; it is a fast-food structure that has long existed in past markets.
Most projects' life cycles—from inception, narrative packaging, fundraising, token issuance,
to liquidity exhaustion and fading attention—often last only a year, or even less.
Then the market quickly shifts to the next project, repeating the same process.
In such an environment, attention is used to chase stories, valuations, and short-term gains, rather than to verify whether the product is truly needed.
Token issuance has become the endpoint, not the beginning.
Practicality and long-termism, in the past market structure, have instead become the least important options.
And the fundamental shift in this cycle is forcing the entire market to confront a more realistic question:
👉 If no one is willing to pay for "fast-food narratives" anymore, what kind of projects are truly qualified to survive?
The answer is actually very clear.
Those projects that have realized the importance of long-termism and practicality are quietly taking shape in this market cycle.
They are not rushing to treat token issuance as the endpoint, but first focus on building the product, users, and structure.
Once these foundations are in place, and they begin to develop multiple projects like traditional companies, the real boom period will arrive.
Such benefits are more likely to appear in IP ecosystems or in tracks like AI + robots, which have long-term demand and external market support, rather than in short-term emotional-driven topics.
Conversely, projects that still rely on narrative financing, narrative-driven valuation, and short-term speculation as their core will ultimately be淘汰ed by the market in the new cycle, just like past air coins.
This also explains why a blockchain industry originally centered on "decentralization" is actually moving closer to a centralized structure in practice.
One overlooked but extremely critical reason is the repeated cycle of narrative泡沫化.
If the market does not change, the crypto industry and blockchain will disappear.