This is a guide to avoiding pitfalls in the crypto space.

If you look at the previous bear market lows and compare them to the recent market highs,
you'll find that many "top-tier" projects from the last cycle have been stuck in a stagnant state throughout the bull market, even hitting new lows.
For example:
• SAND: fell from $8.4 to $0.27, with the recent high below $0.85.
• MANA: dropped from $5.9 to $0.26, and the rebound never even reached $0.8.
• FIL: declined from $237 to $2.4, with a peak only touching $11.4.
• CRV: went from $8.5 to $0.4, not only failing to rally with the bull market but also falling below $0.2 amid relentless selling pressure.
• EOS: dropped from $14 to $0.5, with the recent high only reaching around $1.3 during the new market peak.
• DOT: fell from $55 to below $4, with a high only reaching $11.5 before continuing to decline.
Including ICP, ALGO, XTZ, and others, the funds trapped at the top in the last cycle haven't even had a chance to break even during this bull run.
This exposes several deadly tracks and patterns that must be avoided, serving as painful lessons:
First, Metaverse and early GameFi ( projects like SAND and MANA ).
Relying solely on expectations and gold-farming models, without real-world application or hardware deployment, leads to a bubble burst and no new users entering the market, creating an irreversible death spiral.
Second, tokens with high FDV and no real utility ( like CRV and FIL ).
Massive unlocks are a trap that retail investors can never fill. If the protocol generates huge fees daily but doesn’t capture value in tokens (through buybacks or burns), and relies solely on inflationary emissions, even during a bull market, big funds won’t help lift the historically trapped positions.
Third, established public chains lacking ecosystems ( like EOS and DOT ).
The moat of a public chain has never been about TPS on paper but about developer and capital accumulation. Without breakthrough applications, public chains will only become ghost towns under the pressure of L2 solutions and next-generation high-performance chains.
The market always favors the new and despises the old; funds will only support new kings with sustainable revenue and fresh narratives, not old projects without ecosystems.