"Price leads sentiment" might be true again this time.

There are 100 reasons why we aren't going up from here. The clearest one: 95% of onchain apps failed to pass PMF.
As a heavy DeFi user, it feels like Armageddon hit us. Hacks everywhere. Yields at rock bottom. Most vaults aren't even worth farming anymore once you compare them to the risk-free rate.
This is where I hope I'm wrong, like I've always been. Looking at the dead flowers, not the growing seeds.
Because what survived isn't nothing. Payments, stablecoins, tokenization (yield, stocks, assets), perps, options, privacy, money markets. Strip away the noise and that's basically a new entire financial system.
The last cycle built these pieces in isolation and prayed retail would show up. This time the combination is different: real yield backed by real-world assets, exchanges that actually work onchain, and institutions that put money into these products.
So maybe the bear case and the bull case are the same sentence. 95% died. The 5% that's left is the part that was always going to matter.
Rebuild onchain finance in a new form, with institutions inside the walls this time instead of watching from outside.
Price leads sentiment. And sentiment is exactly this bad right before it doesn't matter anymore.