@monteluna

I think OGs who have survived previous cycles would confirm as well that now we're in a bear market. The key indicator is narrative collapse. Charlatans either in good faith or not, spread new ideas and build with them, but the narrative collapse happens when what they promoted as cycle drivers is not only false, but everyone is realizing it. The main narratives that have collapsed: - AI agents. The reality is the AI agents haven't driven new adoption. Your average household globally is still interfacing with crypto through perpetual options and centralized exchanges. They have zero interest in AI finance from smaller teams incapable of guaranteeing funds are safu. - Vibecoding to get rich. The reality is most if not all this code generated by junior engineering talent is brittle and nowhere near consumer apps. Pretty much every day these apps are down and have not even one 9 of service uptime, which is unacceptable for investors. - ETFs. The entire selling point of "wall street will buy our bags and hold them" was false, as it's becoming clear to people who weren't financially savvy that they were actually doing a yield farming trade to harvest premiums/funding rates. They aren't going to hold tokens unless they can be delta neutral, and they will adjust size as prices go down. - Crypto Social. All data is showing most of the users are bots. No major brand is interested in wasting marketing cycles on platforms where they can see their reach is only going to bots. We can't even get major crypto companies to use crypto social because they just don't want to deal with unverified accounts scamming their users on platforms without real customer service or trust systems that mitigate harmful bot users. - Airdrops as adoption. Pretty much all airdrops show every major drop is uninvestable, because the users are fake. Showing 100K users on a new chain or testnet means nothing. Even the real users instantly dump their tokens because they have zero incentives to hold. None of the teams appear willing to mitigate this, so why would anyone outside of crypto seriously invest in products where the users are fake. Basically, the only teams that made out this cycle were infra. I was reading someone who did a $3M raise, basically had to pay all of it out to audits. Dune, Privy, OpenAI, and Hyperliquid are now the base requirements, and they have all raised prices. This is the same situation post-mobile where every app in 2015 *had* to pay 40% of their revenue to Facebook, Amazon, and Google to exist. We are now out of novel ideas as everyone is basically making a product that's a wrapper of those services. The sad reality is most of these teams and people won't be around soon as they bleed down capital. You already see this in Farcaster with app devs asking for support from Coinbase. That's usually a bearish sign that teams can't actually get investment to sustain operations. Tourism season is over though as teams we thought were "fine" actually aren't, and everyone realizes "Instagram with tokens" or "Hyperliquid but with a new frontend" is basically the 2015 "Uber for X".

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