Actually, there's no need to be pessimistic about the crypto world.

Since returning from Hong Kong to now, my experience is basically the same as other friends involved in market-making businesses. The inquiries about contracts and alpha services from US, Hong Kong, and A-shares speculative funds are roughly two or three times a week.
Many speculative funds have already tried margin financing, and some have even lost money due to improper operations, but they still believe "it's definitely because they didn't find the right approach," much like everyone paying tuition fees for AI trading — everyone is actively trying to get in.
Over ten years ago, I started a niche IB business helping speculative funds go public. The biggest difference between speculative funds and retail investors is: their top priority is controllability, not sector/ narrative hype.
On the contrary, narratives are tools in their hands. When everyone rushes in, the speculative funds might have already taken profits and retreated 3-6 months earlier, moving on to the next market they can control. This is the main factor behind the so-called "sector rotation."
When everyone, including large institutions, enters hot sectors like AI upstream/downstream, US stocks, Korean stocks, etc., it causes a squeeze-out effect on a large number of speculative assets. On one hand, it's profit-taking; on the other, the market cap becomes too large to control.
The crypto market, after the US, Hong Kong, and Korea, is one of the few markets where effective manipulation can attract counterparty liquidity (compared to China, Taiwan, Europe, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and other top ten stock markets, which have relatively high regional entry barriers for attracting global retail investors). It also offers completely asymmetric controllability and costs (including compliance costs and chip acquisition costs): manageable, controllable, profitable, and portable.
Many crypto brothers who shout about quitting the industry, if a small hot spot appears, will basically be "ready to come at any time, able to fight when they arrive." Their entry rate is far higher than that of old A-share investors, and it's purely chip betting — no prior knowledge needed to participate, low threshold.
These speculative funds are the main new growth drivers in the industry today. For them, the biggest narrative in crypto is a perfect "gaming layer."
Anything can be used for gaming experiments, and feasible gaming products will be brought back into traditional finance to make money, such as perpetual contracts, event contracts, and dividend pools (like Canton Guangdong Chain). It’s like F1 prototype technology feeding back into civilian cars.
So many crypto industry practitioners have always misunderstood the current problem: it's not that there are no good applications, but that the target is wrong — they haven't served speculative funds and market makers well.
For example:
- How to help them quickly gather counterparty liquidity?
- How to provide them with a platform to operate, preventing risks like withdrawal freezes?
- How to improve market-making capital efficiency?
- How to lower the learning curve for using trading tools?
- How to reduce the risk of being discovered or linked?
Each of these involves fundamental logic and is a big business. Moreover, this is a business unique to East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Dubai — only here can you hear frank discussions from London, Wall Street, and Wudaokou about controlling chips and margin financing.
These places do not belong to any major government forces, and there are no restrictions on capital.
Serving them must be what @DoveyWanCN mentioned — Chinese-speaking English speakers.
So, those still in the industry or in any industry, don’t overthink it. Don’t be fooled by superficial noise — the real big money is hidden beneath the surface.