After reviewing the altcoin markets across all sectors today, I felt a chill in my heart.

Counting from the peak in December 2024 to now, December 2025, it's been a whole year—aside from a few top-tier projects and strong tokens with actual narratives supporting them, over 90% of altcoins have crashed miserably. Dropping 3 to 5 times? That’s considered lucky. Most have evaporated by 7x or even 10x, with the chart lines plunging to a point that's hard to look at.

For friends who have held tokens for a year, losses of 5x to 10x on paper are the norm. Even more surreal is that, although the black swan event on October 11 was brutal (with 1.64 million people liquidated and some tokens nearly going to zero), the accumulated losses from the slow, grinding decline over this past year have almost caught up to the impact of that single day. A slow bleed hurts even more than a swift cut.

I keep wondering: where did all the money evaporated this year ultimately go? Who quietly drained the market's liquidity? XRP is still propped up by expectations of regulatory easing, and Solana is holding on thanks to its tech ecosystem, but most altcoins have no real ability to fight back—the whereabouts of the money truly remains a mystery.