"Lowering Expectations" New Normal: Survival Rules and Value Reconstruction in the Crypto Market

The market will next enter a large cycle of “lowering expectations”:

1. The project team Builder lowers expectations, shifting from a luxurious entrepreneurial team valued at over hundreds of millions with financing in the tens of millions, back to a financing of 100,000 dollars, adopting a “survive at all costs” combat mentality;

2. VC investors are lowering their expectations. The high valuation model that followed the Fomo trend of large VCs is no longer effective. The VCs that survive will inevitably return to seek out small and beautiful innovative tech teams or will engage in Ponzi schemes. Small investments, multiple targets, and quick exits will become mainstream. What, gathering a network?? You must also meet the threshold for gathering a network.

3. Holders are lowering their expectations. Previously, they adhered to the “technology narrative + long-termism” and always wanted to follow past experientialism to achieve significant returns (10-100 times). In the future, retail investors will have to strengthen their “trader” skills, appropriately increase trading frequency on the premise of having some basic research and learning capabilities, and give up the illusion of hundred or thousand times returns. Achieving 3-5 times returns is already extremely difficult (excluding pure PVP lottery logic). After all, the situation for this generation of holders is quite harsh, and everyone has learned deep lessons.

4. Airdrop expectations are lowered for “luer”. When everyone focuses their attention on “luming” (collecting), it actually narrows the potential reward space for airdrop, especially given the extremely mature background of the studio’s industrial assembly line. Therefore, it is highly likely that “quietly luming” will become the norm, and the days of investing tens of thousands in “luming” will become history. The focus will be on being able to collect for free without heavy investments, enjoying opportunities privately, and never sharing with others.

5. Market narratives lower expectations. In the past, the Crypto market would always pursue the “narrative resonance” effect, from DeFi, NFT, GameFi, to Restaking, BTCFi, chain abstraction, AI Agent. Each round of narratives aimed to replicate the glory of the previous DeFi Summer. However, it has been proven that the evolution of narrative expectations has weakened significantly, making it difficult for the market to support a huge market bubble based solely on a single technological narrative. Perhaps a multitude of blooming micro-narratives will become the norm.

6. The construction of chain infra has lowered expectations. In the past, Crypto relied on continuously stacking infra narratives to expand expectations, from high-performance layer 1 to Rollup layer 2, as well as various blockchain architecture models with differentiated technical routes. It has been proven that the era of purely technical supremacy is over; in the future, the market will only turn to “attention supremacy.” Without community stickiness and sustained capital accumulation and circulation, infra will lose its market.

7. The expectation of wealth effect from CEX is declining. For a long time, CEX has become the focus of public opinion and discussion due to its control over the vast majority of liquidity. The so-called “CEX listing effect” and “DEX PVP free market” have become the A and B sides of the market’s attention chase. However, overly relying on CEX to create wealth effects will inevitably lead to a weakening of the listing effect. Ultimately, the wealth effect should be determined by the project’s long-term build cycle and entry cost.