I don’t know if you’ve noticed a phenomenon: the successful big brothers of the past are gradually repaying the money back to the market.

For example, the brother who made a killing off NFTs, in Hyperliquid’s Perps, has lost over $70 million in six months; James Wynn, who almost got out through MEME coins, lost $100 million in a single week on Hyperliquid.
I’m saying this not to gloat, but to tell everyone that a major change has already appeared in the crypto world: the crypto world has moved from the era of narrative dividends into the era of trader dividends.
At first glance, many people might not agree. The big brothers are losing money—so why do you say it’s now the traders’ golden period?
But in many cases, real change is precisely counterintuitive.
In the past season, what did the market reward? It rewarded narratives, incremental capital, and valuation expansion. If you stood on the updraft, Qinghua and Beida wouldn’t matter as much as having the nerve—you could go all in and still get out, and even roll all the way into a boss. In that stage, much of the money people made wasn’t because their trading ability was that strong, but because the whole market itself was expanding. Assets were rising, liquidity was surging, and stories were fermenting—so long as you were inside the arena, you could often get lifted up together with the market.
But it’s different now.
Now, the crypto market isn’t the kind of market that can lift up a bunch of people just by expanding. Expansion has slowed, broad-based rallies have decreased, and the old way of making money is increasingly failing. The market is switching from an expansion market to a volatility market.
What does that mean?
It means that those who made big money in the past but didn’t want to leave can only keep staying in the arena, and go back into battlefields like Hyperliquid, continuing the fight by relying on volatility, trading, and Perps.
The problem is right here.
Being able to profit from expansion and being able to trade volatility are fundamentally not the same thing. The former often depends on position, while the latter is fought on rhythm, position sizing, risk control, and execution. Many people who made money in the past didn’t really because they were truly good at trading, but because that stage was simply easier to make money.
But once the market switches from an expansion logic to a volatility logic, the money in this group of people’s hands will, in fact, become the easiest money for the market to take away. Because they have capital, ambition, inertia, and past success experience—but unfortunately they don’t have a sufficiently solid trading system. As a result, the money earned in the old stage will, little by little, be returned to the market in the new stage.
This group of people are today’s fattiest opposing side in the trading market.
And the brother who made a killing off NFTs isn’t isolated. They’re just richer and more noticeable, but essentially, they’re an amplified version of the overall participant structure of the entire crypto market.
Crypto users naturally carry a very strong gambling mentality, while at the same time generally lacking basic financial knowledge, and not having truly complete risk control training. Put bluntly, they’re both inexperienced and love to gamble.
When these people trade Perps, they’re not really trading—they’re betting on whether prices will rise or fall, betting on direction, and betting that they won’t be the last one to die. First battle equals final showdown; going all in is wisdom. So in the end, a very typical result appears: everyone listens to roughly the same KOLs, follows roughly the same news, analyzes roughly the same K-lines, and then in roughly the same market conditions, makes roughly the same moves—leaving a huge number of stop-loss orders, liquidation orders, and emotional trades neatly hung at roughly the same levels.
This is a nightmare for gambling addicts, but for real traders, it’s the biggest opportunity.
Because what trading fears most is never that the market is too fierce, but that the market has no flaws. The crypto world is exactly the opposite—here, flaws are not only abundant, they’re also highly concentrated.
If you look further down, you’ll find that the market environment itself is also cooperating with all of this.
Traditional futures aren’t something that only emerged these past few years. CBOT can be traced back to 1848, CME was founded in 1898—this is a system refined over more than a hundred years by spot markets, industries, hedging, rules, and time. Of course it will also fluctuate and involve struggle, but behind it there are always stronger real-world constraints.
Crypto’s Perps ecosystem, however, is very young, and Perps themselves are the most active trading products today. In many cases, the true marginal price-setters in the crypto market aren’t spot buyers, but the leveraged positions themselves.
This means that today’s crypto market is, at its core, a market that more easily amplifies volatility through liquidation chains.
Perps have no expiration date; funding rates continuously adjust longs and shorts; prices are anchored around the spot price, but they won’t truly stop. Add 24/7, no halts, low barriers, and convenient leverage—this market is naturally more aggressive than many traditional markets.
So, how prices move in the short term often doesn’t depend entirely on fundamentals, but on who has the more fragile position, whose leverage is higher, and who is more likely to be knocked out first.
You’ll find that the structure of participants and the structure of the market almost perfectly match.
On one side, there’s a group of people who made money during the expansion era, but may not truly know how to trade. On the other side, there’s a market centered on Perps, led by volatility and liquidations, with extremely low barriers. The former brings in money and mistakes; the latter takes those mistakes, amplifies them, prices them, and liquidates them.
When both sides stack together, the crypto market is no longer just a place for telling stories—it’s increasingly becoming a market that specializes in harvesting position errors.
That’s why today’s trading dividend period exists.
In the past, money was spilling over together when the market expanded; now, more of the money is taken out from other people’s positions. In the past, the biggest beneficiaries were those who dared to charge, dared to bet, and dared to believe the story; now, the advantage belongs more to those who understand volatility, understand positions, understand the liquidation chain, and understand collective behavior.
Many people still think they’re finding opportunities in this market, but in reality they’re just hanging themselves up as liquidity for others. What true traders see isn’t just whether prices go up or down—they also see who will panic first, who will fail to hold on first, and who will expose their positions first.
This is the worst era in the crypto world.
But for traders, this is precisely the best era. $BTC ‌$ETH ‌$SOL ‌