The current situation in traditional finance is becoming increasingly similar to the crypto world at the beginning of 2024, and it feels more and more like the crypto space is an accelerated version of traditional finance.

Recently, I exchanged ideas with a few friends from the top-tier VC / PE circles, and I found that some are trying to jump to the secondary market, with extreme cases of resigning entirely to focus on trading stocks (although there may be survivor bias).
The main reason for actively exiting the primary market is to stop just going through the motions with LPs and to seize the secondary opportunities driven by AI dividends and get on board in time. I used to think that working in the primary market was about colliding with the smartest minds and investing in the most cutting-edge narratives; now I realize that, in name only, I am “doing investments,” but in reality, I’ve become a senior compliance clerk following procedures.
Occasionally, a fundamentally solid project appears, and a bunch of institutions scramble to grab that tiny share.
As someone who has been fighting in the secondary market for years, I understand this shift in mindset all too well. Is the secondary market really easy to operate? Absolutely not. In this extremely inhumane meat grinder, making mistakes costs much more in real-time than in the primary market. Moreover, since the beginning of this year, the US stock market has been mainly driven by sector rotation, and large-cap stocks are no longer as easy to push.
At the beginning of 2024, a similar scene is emerging in the crypto primary market: good projects are in short supply, with overwhelming oversubscription, and fewer projects are available for primary investment. As a result, several waves of primary institutions are shifting to secondary institutions.
However, most of these primary institutions in the crypto space ultimately get lost in the brutal and high-frequency secondary trading cycles. $BTC