I was very sorry to see @ ABCDELabs announce the cessation of investment yesterday. During last year's 2049 period in Singapore, I had conversations with two bosses, @ BMANLead and @ DujunX, about the logic of first level transformation chain market making/front-end agency. At that time, I could also feel that they sincerely wanted to support long-term investment, but at the same time, they were also anxious about adapting to the new market environment Although I am often seen as a typical representative of Crypto finance nihilists, as a former VC, I still greatly admire teams that are willing to adhere to long termism The real problem is that in this market, from top VC exchanges to project parties, many of them are promoting their long termism without knowing what kind of build is effective, or in other words, what kind of people will be rewarded in this market? In fact, this answer has never changed: You can look back at the main characters that emerged and have survived in those rounds of the market: -2017-2018: ICO fundraising methods and exchanges - unlicensed primary fundraising pool+low threshold access to high volatility secondary trading market -2019: Perpetual Contract - Everyone Can Add Leverage -2020: DeFi dominated by AMM/lending - a thorough permissionless liquidity model+permissionless leverage - 2021-22： NFT+Tugou - High volatility and low liquidity trading model - 2023: Friendtech style Bonding Curve and Inscription - incorporating KOL propagation logic with zero pre liquidity requirements and anti cheating (RUG) liquidity model, as well as low liquidity and ultra-high fairness volatility trading model - 2024: Pump Fun type launch pad - Unified model of fluidity from 0 to 100 You will find that the market continues to reward teams that can continuously create assets and markets with high volatility and liquidity at the lowest cost And without an "application" narrative that can create volatility and liquidity, it's basically useless. As @ YeruiZhang Ruishen mentioned, the logic of "Web3" for "refactoring Web2" is as follows: Social，Gaming，ID， Calculate one by one Because these projects are essentially products of the "platform application" logic of traditional large factories, which are ultimately commercialized (harvested) through application. This logic requires decreasing scale and marginal cost, without the need for liquidity But what is the cryptocurrency circle? Coins can be "commercialized" from day one, and liquidity is an inherent "commercialization" indicator. Abandoning this main indicator means that you do not belong to the cryptocurrency circle, and your valuation model and competitor comparison will slide to Web2, and then you cannot beat Web2 competitors - in the cryptocurrency circle, liquidity is the moat, and the mechanism is the main asset (not "application" products) You may say: ”If Crypto is just a casino, then it shouldn't have such a high valuation“ This kind of thinking is a common problem among many venture capitalists with traditional financial backgrounds, who simply treat speculation as a casino. The reason why a casino is a casino is because its mechanism is only based on probability and house edge, and cannot choose other strategies. And Crypto should be a substitute for the entire financial market If you use first principles to look at the entire financial industry, you will find that the entire purpose of the "finance" industry is to maximize trading efficiency, speed, and sustainability, and to match buyers and sellers Finance does not exist as a product, it is a complex mechanism consisting of execution machines and personnel designed based on this mechanism, nothing more，nothing less。 And the occurrence of transactions is inevitably due to volatility and liquidity The "fundamentals" of assets in traditional finance are not brought about by traditional finance itself, but by market participants' perceptions of the asset itself, based on the non-financial business aspects behind the asset. No matter how you change the mechanism and execution of finance, you can only change the efficiency of "finance" as a mechanism, and cannot change the "ideology" based on objective observation of the "fundamentals" of an asset. This is why assets that cannot be sold by traditional finance cannot be sold on the chain either If there is something (a public chain) that allows anyone to create various trading mechanisms in any form without permission, with extremely low costs, and the cost of preventing permissionlessness in this mechanism is extremely high (unable to regulate), then this is actually reshaping the current financial industry with 10X greater efficiency And this financial mechanism only needs to set how liquidity and volatility are created, rewarding whoever creates more. As for why trading is provided, it should not be part of the mechanism design itself (deregulation) This kind of thing is not overvalued, but more likely undervalued. What it lacks may be an opportunity, similar to the Black Boat incident, to forcefully pull existing weak commodities and markets into a stronger pricing consensus logic. Isn't giving everyone the right to create assets a stronger logic? The answer to the industry has long been fluttering in the wind, but most people are covered in a red cloth