The 2025 Crypto Market Chaos: An Absurd Spectacle Sweeping the Entire Industry

The crypto world of 2025 is filled with wild stories born from the collision of human nature, greed, and technology. This year, we witnessed too many events that defy imagination, each of which could become a “fragment of memory” in the crypto scene.

The Extreme Game of Power Monetization

The most surreal moment at year’s end was the ultimate tokenization of political identities. After Trump’s namesake Meme coin swept the market, his wife Melania launched the MELANIA token. This was not a technological innovation or ecological concept; it was a direct monetization of celebrity influence and traffic. With the boost of the attention economy, any identity could quickly be turned into a speculative tool. This event pushed the Meme frenzy in the crypto market to a new absurd height.

The Outrageous Scripts of Founders

The “performances” of project founders this year have completely broken through moral bottom lines.

Northern Myanmar Disappearance Incident: In February, DIN announced on TGE day that founder Harold had gone missing in northern Myanmar, “disappearing” along with the multi-signature wallet holding the main tokens and his laptop. Strangely, the team immediately announced that the token was still being issued as usual, claiming it had received approval from two-thirds of the multi-sig. This logic sparked controversy in the community—how much credibility does a project have when it cannot even guarantee basic security?

The Ultimate “Pseudo-Death Exit” Drama: Even more surreal than the Northern Myanmar incident was the “suicide” script staged by Zerebro co-founder Jeffy Yu in May. Fake suicide videos and obituaries circulated online, causing the meme coin LLJEFFY to surge to a market cap of $30 million. The plot twist soon followed—Jeffy Yu finally admitted it was a carefully planned “pseudo-death exit” aimed at resolving personal disputes and stabilizing the token price. This event, which manipulated the market using death as a topic, is regarded as the first such extreme deception in crypto history, plunging moral boundaries into the abyss.

The Absurd Distortion of Security Boundaries

Interactions between hackers and project teams this year presented a darkly humorous “black comedy.”

In April, a hacker who had stolen a large amount of funds from zkLend accidentally entered a phishing site while laundering money through Tornado Cash, resulting in the theft of 2,930 ETH in stolen funds. Ironically, this hacker then proactively sent on-chain messages to zkLend to apologize and “pleaded” with the project to shift the investigation target to the phishing site operator. The two even engaged in substantive cooperation. This bizarre interaction between victim and perpetrator satirically reflects the complexity of asset flows in the crypto world—hackers themselves cannot fully control their stolen assets.

On the Base chain, the bizarre separation between project Clanker and developer proxystudio was not based on on-chain data analysis but was revealed at the FarCon offline conference when attendees recognized proxystudio’s real identity—Gabagool.eth, the same person who in 2022 embezzled $350,000 from the Velodrome team and was later dubbed the “on-chain detective.” Once famous for tracking down thieves, Gabagool.eth has now become the protagonist of the Gabagool meme story. After rebranding and entering a new project, he was exposed because of a “familiar face” offline. This comedic “exposure” highlights the fragility of anonymity in the crypto world when offline identities intersect.

The Farce of Project Self-Subversion

Some projects’ “betrayal” of their own positioning directly challenges users’ basic perceptions.

In June, Bitcoin Lightning wallet Alby made a shocking move: citing terms of service, it directly “zeroed out” the balances of long-inactive accounts. This operation imposed custodial logic onto the decentralized philosophy, prompting community ridicule that this was “Alby redefining wallets.” The core question then arose: When wallet service providers can unilaterally dispose of user assets, what remains of the spirit of self-custody?

In October, stablecoin issuer Paxos, due to operational errors, suddenly minted $300 trillion worth of PYUSD, which was then urgently destroyed within 22 minutes. This number exceeded twice the total global GDP. Although it did not cause an actual market crash, its dramatic nature was akin to a financial nuclear explosion, starkly exposing the risks of human error in large on-chain operations.

Layer2 project Eclipse’s “self-deprecating culture” is another spectacle. After scandals involving founders and management changes, the project recently mocked the community on social media with absurd statements like “Harvard University’s 36-month sociology research has been completed,” and later, when describing its ecosystem on official channels, bluntly stated “we have no users.” This self-destructive communication reflects the complex mentality of some projects after their ecosystems weaken and trust collapses, serving as a distorted form of marketing venting in an increasingly competitive industry.

The Naked Truth of Market Manipulation

The final disillusionment comes from the complete failure of price discovery mechanisms.

Multiple incidents this year showed that the price charts of certain altcoins are not the result of market battles but are carefully “drawn” by manipulators. Leaked chat records from manipulators reveal they can freely manipulate price patterns, crushing quantitative trading models into dust. This blatantly exposes that in small-cap crypto assets, short-term price discovery has completely failed and has become purely a game of capital pools.

Reflection: What Are We Building?

2025 ends amidst a series of absurd events. The moral risks of founders, the blurred boundaries of security, the collapse of project trust, bottomless traffic cash-outs, and naked market manipulation—all these farces question the core issues of the crypto world:

What kind of new system is this industry truly building? How much of the ideal remains, and how much mud has been mixed into reality?