After the exposure of LIBRA, what should the meme market reflect on?

Editor's note: This article explores the insider operations in the cryptocurrency field, especially the meme coin and hype coin issuance, and the ethical and market issues it brings, revealing the private transactions, information leaks, sniper behaviors, and how insiders manipulate the market with technology and capital during token issuance, resulting in retail investors almost unable to purchase tokens at low market cap. In addition, the article also discusses the prevalent disappointment in the cryptocurrency industry, pointing out that the encryption market is mostly seen as a speculative place in a Zero-sum Game. Despite the industry's wide range of ethical issues, there is still insufficient public discussion on these phenomena and a lack of effective solutions.

The following is the original content (for ease of reading comprehension, the original content has been reorganized):

The interview with Hayden Davis by Coffeezilla, discussing the launch of LIBRA, sounds quite interesting. It reveals some common practices that most people think are facts but have never openly admitted, as well as the extent to which these practices are spread.

But in my opinion, the interview also touched on some very interesting topics, especially regarding MEME coin and speculative coin issuance, these topics go beyond the described criminal behavior, I think they deserve a broader discussion in this field.

Or, this is a 'Emperor's New Clothes' moment, revealing the truth that can no longer be concealed. Let's list some important highlights:

Most of the 'meme coins' are launched on a large scale after private transactions, where some or most of the supply is bought at a price lower than the issuance Market Cap or distributed to KOLs and other entities.

2. Due to the involvement of many people, each with different agendas and affiliations, early information about these Tokens/trades is often 'leaked' to others who are not involved in the transactions.

3. From Hayden Davis himself: 'So how do you make money?' In other words, all these entities firmly believe that the only way to make big money is to become an insider manipulating the game, with no fairness, and no room for those excluded.

4. Part of the reason is point 2 (information leakage), but inevitably, once the Token is effectively deployed on a public blockchain and exists at a smart contract address, there will be many technically mature and well-funded ('snipers') seizing a large supply in the initial few seconds of the Token's lifecycle. Since they have no affiliation with the 'team,' they do not mind disrupting the market charts by dumping their Tokens.

5. So far, the 'team' response to the fourth issue is that they themselves also snipe (I think it is by commission), to 'restrict' the supply that other snipers can grab and dump. Surprisingly, they do not consider this unethical or manipulative, but regard it as 'protecting' retail investors and market charts.

6. There is a gray area where Hayden mentioned that this portion of supply/liquidity (also by 'extracting' part of the funds from liquidity pools such as meteora) is considered as 'financial reserves' for maintaining medium to long-term market charts, but also as a source of profit for the team. It seems that there is a large amount of mixed funds here, and 'retail investors' are unaware of the true purpose of these funds.

7. Most of the unique 'organic' meme coins have either died out or been relaunched after dying (often operated by a team similar to point 1).

8. The team managing these large-scale speculative issuances hopes that the Token can remain active for several months, "ideally for 1-2 years", but the reality is that Tokens rarely survive more than a few days. They attribute the problem to point 4 (snipers).

Among these insiders, there is a widespread and consistent cynical view that Cryptocurrency, all Cryptocurrency, most of them have no practicality or use case, is a Zero-sum Game, the purpose is to find the next bigger fool to take over, it is a game of maximizing value extraction. According to Hayden, this is 'top-down, even including Bitcoin'.

10. They have a distorted moral view, believing that although traditional capital markets (such as stocks, etc.) are considered 'manipulative and corrupt', despite all the regulations and laws, accusing Cryptocurrency of being a manipulated game is a hypocritical act. The idea that Cryptocurrency can serve as a new platform to establish a fairer gaming environment is viewed as naive and childish.

As I mentioned above, despite admitting to widespread criminal behavior in the interview, I believe that some of the viewpoints have hardly been addressed in the public encryption discussion. As for the 'solution,' it seems scarce, idealized, or the problem itself is treated lightly as irrelevant.

First, the public transparency of the blockchain makes it a 'solved problem' once the smart contract address (CA) of a Token is established, and some participants have the necessary technical capabilities and almost unlimited capital to seize a large supply within the first few seconds of the Token's lifecycle.

Basically, the chance for retail investors to buy tokens with a low Market Cap is almost zero, unless it is a 'dead coin' and you are lucky enough to encounter subsequent operations (usually these tokens will be preempted by insiders).

This is a huge unresolved issue for any Token that even wants to be directly pushed to the market, that is, skipping private investment rounds (but even those may be sniped at TGE).

There are some possible temporary solutions and alternatives, I personally have not seen them tested, such as deploying 50 Tokens to pumpfun on a large scale, and then keeping the true CA address unknown after binding and reaching sufficient Market Cap. This will force snipers to either diversify their capital or gamble on guessing the CA, thus limiting retail losses, but does not fundamentally solve the problem. At the same time, this will also be affected by the leakage of the true CA address by insiders (possibly sold to snipers in exchange for money, etc.).

Another big issue is cynicism.

This may be worth writing a separate article (or even more!), but basically, the main theme of this cycle so far has been disappointment: In my opinion, most participants, especially newcomers, are not optimistic about the promise of Cryptocurrency to build decentralized finance (DeFi), that is, people can become sovereign holders of their own funds, operate without third-party intermediaries, and are not limited by national borders, costs, etc.

Now, most Cryptocurrencies are seen as a wild gamble, with no Token being considered innocent, they are just speculative assets without backing or utility, everything is seen as a Zero-sum Game, in this game, it's only a matter of me losing and you gaining, everyone is playing the 'bigger fool' game, until the music stops.

Let me add one more point, which is not to blame them at all, because even if we consider Ethereum as the first mature step towards 'world computer' and 'DeFi', its smart contract technology and this industry have been close to 15 years now. While there are a few respectable protocols that meet the DeFi needs of thousands of users, 15 years is a long time for both technology and finance. I think we can say that it has 'largely not fulfilled' its promises.

However, I see so much discussion about criminal behavior, loss of money, and ethical lapses, but there is not enough discussion to ask ourselves: what are we really building here? Are we really providing an alternative to the traditional financial, banking, and institutional shackles, or are we building an alternative?

Is it that we are left with Bitcoin becoming a traditional financial asset, while the rest of the space is a paradise for bandits trying to squeeze money from desperate individuals with no clue?

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