Are altcoins ultimately destined to go to zero—does that make sense?

Yes, and it’s not just a meme—there’s a fairly solid structural logic behind it.

Why altcoins going to zero is a highly probable outcome, not an accident:

1. Liquidity is the line between life and death. The daily trading volume of most altcoins is extremely thin, and the “book numbers” of their market caps are built on very few marginal trades. Once the main players or the project team withdraw liquidity, buy pressure disappears, and the price can drop by more than 90% within a few hours—effectively, going to zero.

2. The incentive structure for project teams is naturally unfavorable to retail investors. When tokens are issued, the project team’s holdings often account for 20%-50% of the total supply, and sometimes even more. After unlocking, the selling pressure is systemic rather than “accidental”—that’s how the system is designed. Retail investors take the bag, the project team cashes out, and the cycle repeats.

3. Narratives have a shelf life: DeFi Summer, NFTs, GameFi, the metaverse… Each cycle comes with a batch of “this time is different” narratives. After the tide of the narrative recedes, 99% of projects revert to having their fair valuation—zero. Projects that can survive across cycles and preserve value are few and far between.

4. The BTC siphon effect. When market risk appetite declines, capital moves from altcoins to BTC/ETH, then from ETH back to BTC, and ultimately to stablecoins or fiat. Altcoins are “the riskiest of risky assets,” so in every bear market, the downside drawdowns are often 3-10 times those of BTC.

5. Most teams don’t have the long-term execution capability. It’s a hundred times easier to write a white paper than to actually deliver on it.

On-chain activity, developer submission records, and the actual number of protocol users—these hard indicators often drop to zero quickly after a bull market ends, with the coin price only reflecting it with a lag.

So does that mean you absolutely can’t touch altcoins? That’s not what it means. A small number of projects do, in fact, create returns of dozens of times or even hundreds of times in every cycle. The key is:

• You buy during the narrative launch phase, not during the “catch-up rally” after it’s already risen 10x.

• You have clear take-profit discipline—holding without selling is essentially giving the profits back to the market.

• Position sizing stays within a reasonable proportion of total assets; it’s not all-in.

Altcoins aren’t unable to make money, but the “hold until you break even” strategy has, in most projects, proven to fail based on history. The reason going to zero “makes sense” is precisely because the market is actually very honest—it will ultimately only price what is truly useful.