Forward the Original Title ‘The People are Tired (of losing) ’

As @_Kaitoai highlighted, the mention of the word “tired” on Cryptotwitter (CT) has been increasing steadily during the last two weeks of January 2025.

This is coupled with a shared sentiment that this cycle differs from the others and is much more challenging, even surprising traders who have been here for 2 or 3 cycles.

The market is changing: narratives come and go at a much faster pace, and attention is the most scarce currency.

Last but not least, the increasing regulatory scrutiny and involvement of politics in crypto are bringing new variables within the equation.

The people are tired.

Why is it so?

Retails have been late to the party for too long, and every time it seems like the goal is close, the meta changes faster than the previous one.

During the 2021 cycle, we witnessed VCs having exponential returns compared to retails who did not have access to private deals.

All this continued until around 2023, with launches such as $TIA and $DYM, which marked the end of retails’ disillusionment with these capital-extraction techniques by VCs.

What could have been the most rational consequence to this?

A movement seeking to shift the reins of power.

Memecoins, a narrative well-known for years, have received more and more attention since there were no longer VCs with private bags that could offload onto the open market on the heads of unaware buyers.

This worked well for retails, who managed to find a level playing field. Until the narrative became saturated and overly exaggerated, shortening the attention span of users even more.

Let’s examine how the landscape evolves and where we might be headed next, trying to explain why people are tired.

Epoch1 (Early 2024) - From VC coins to memes

This seems almost a lifetime ago.

Before the AI madness and the meme mania, there used to be a time when the retail meta was airdrop farming.

This meta was kickstarted by the airdrop of @Arbitrum and other Layer 2s (L2s).

Retail users saw the possibility of farming airdrops just by trying new protocols and chains. Airdrop farming became a business, with airdrop-as-a-service companies and more.

However, the dream became a nightmare when these coins started launching and disclosing their tokenomics. Users were highly disappointed: all that work, and they got airdropped little to nothing?

One of the most contentious launches was that of Scroll ($SCR), the ZK-EVM L2.

After launching a 1+ year long ecosystem campaign, the airdrop was highly disappointing, with the questionable choice to destinate 5.5% of the $SCR supply to Binance - rather than the community.

Furthermore, most of these tokens launched with a very low float (circulating supply/total supply) and very high allocations to VCs.

Another discussed development regards $TIA and $DYM. For a while, the narrative for these tokens on CT revolved around staking them in exchange for the hope of future airdrops from ecosystem projects.

You’re guessing it right: these airdrops never happened, and the token price action is down only ($DYM chart below).

Here’s an overview of the different rounds and investor unlocks for TIA:

During the first unlock post-cliff, over 97.5% of the TIA circulating supply was unlocked, worth over $1.88, and daily TIA unlocks were $10m a day.

Eventually, retail became fed up with these kinds of tokens, meaning that most of them launched with a down-only price and ended up even below the valuation of their last raise.

This is evident when we look at the dashboard provided by:

This dashboard takes into account the best-performing investment for each of the VCs in the data sample.

• VC returns past cycle:

• VC returns this cycle:

The end of the VC era was so evident that even Hayes got it right in his essay of December 2024:

https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/the-cure

At the end of the tunnel, a beam of hope appeared for retails: memecoins.

Tired of VC-led cabals, now retails can finally access the permissionless market that blockchains were intended for.

This must be the way forward.

Right?

Epoch 2 - Memecoin Mania

After the end of the rule of VCs, users had to find a new meta, and they found it with memes, pushed by @muststopmurad and his “memecoin supercycle”.

For retails, memes seemed the closest thing to having equal opportunities in the market - until they were not anymore.

Prices rise, Trump is elected. We’re going to the moon.

But suddenly, the liquidity plug was lifted, moving the attention elsewhere, and all your memecoins tanked as the market retraced.

Meanwhile, all the insiders who had the opportunity to position themselves early also had the chance to offload their bags.

Perhaps retail users ended up being even worse than what they had experienced with VC coins.

What’s left now? Becoming even more risk-prone and lowering the attention span further, fragmenting liquidity, and trying to make sense of the mistakes made through even more gambling disguised as “trading”.

Pumpfun is only a symptom of the direction the market has taken.

@jediBlocmates has highlighted this net-negative problem for the ecosystem.

Among the reasons mentioned, the Pump.Fun team keeps on off-ramping large amounts of fees. Only this last month, they moved over 880,877 $SOL to Kraken, for a total of $211,410,480.

The impact of memes and the pump dot fun mania are evident in the changes they have brought to the market: narratives shift fast, the environment is pvp, and people don’t believe in something anymore.

Epoch 3 - Market PTSD: The People Are Tired

Tired from losing to VCs, users now carry the scars of the pump dot fun arena, hoping their next 100x will compensate for their losses.

The market is now forever changed, and the new meta is a reflection of this:

• Market rotations are much shorter and faster: in the previous cycles, you could sleep with open positions and hold tokens for weeks, nowadays, you can hold them for days or hours, at best.
• New launches suck all liquidity: Attention is scarce, and everyone is playing the same game.
• Increasing impact of politics and regulations: this has been evident with the launch of TRUMP, highlighting the potential for unprecedented external events that can highly impact the market

Unfortunately, once again, retails are lost in this game, and many of these tokens resemble the extractive mechanisms they are already too familiar with.

Counter to the trend, the @Hyperliquidx launch has brought new attention to community-led airdrops and launches. With over 31% of the airdrop distributed to the community and a token price up over 7x since launch, Hyperliquid has shown that it is possible to do a fair launch.

$HYPE

Nonetheless, it is essential to consider that not everyone can replicate this model, as running Hyperliquid for so long has incurred the team colossal expenses in the tens of millions.

What matters is that the Hyperliquid launch has been a paradigm shift in the sector. Coupled with the launch of Kaito, there is a shift in how projects approach their launches.

Where does this leave us?

The epochs taken into consideration highlight two extremes:

1. Too much power in VCs’ hands: Retail has no access to private rounds and is used as exit liquidity
2. Unlimited access to memecoins leads to a pvp market and overall worse market conditions

Both have the same consequences: the unhappiness of retail users and the need to find a balance and an equilibrium.

We leave you with some ideas of how this could look like:

• A return to utility: less focus on memecoins and more focus on projects with real-world utility

• Less focus on value extraction more on value creation, and avoiding zero-sum games.
• A return of fair launches, inspired by Hyperliquid
• A new shift in the way protocols market and launch tokens, leveraging tools like Kaito for marketing and growth campaigns and awareness of their social graph and community

Although we are all aware that price is the best marketing tool and has been a fundamental factor in attracting smart people and liquidity, it would be a shame to focus on value extraction right now that a supportive regulatory environment is just around the corner.

It is common for the growth cycle of an emerging market to be dotted with ups and downs like a rollercoaster, but it is essential to visualize an ultimate goal that can mark a viable path for most people.

To build real stuff.

Disclaimer：

1. This article is reprinted from [francesco]. *Forward the Original Title ‘The People are Tired (of losing) ’. All copyrights belong to the original author [ francesco and @chilla_ct ]. If there are objections to this reprint, please contact the Gate Learn team, and they will handle it promptly.
2. Liability Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not constitute any investment advice.
3. Translations of the article into other languages are done by the Gate Learn team. Unless mentioned, copying, distributing, or plagiarizing the translated articles is prohibited.