Deep Bear and Noisy Bull

Author: haotian

After chatting with some Builders, I was surprised to find that they are not pessimistic about the arrival of a bear market; instead, they hope that the “deep bear” can last a bit longer. Why? I tried to speculate on their mindset:

1. From the 2023 craze of the inscription “pseudo-innovation”, to the narrative of BTC layer 2 where Eastern and Western VCs refuse to take over, then to the issuance narrative of AI Agent MEME assets that surged on Solana, and finally to the series of artificial bullish trends initiated by BN, the entire bull market is fragmented into waves of short-lived attention nodes: lively but fleeting, leaving a mess behind.

It can be said that “True Bull” has come from the future, and it can also be said that “False Bull” has never left, but the once familiar “Super Bull” like DeFi Summer and the NFT breakout, which could drive off-chain growth through on-chain innovation, has become out of reach.

2. What despair the Builders feel the most is that after the voice promoting the MEME Super Cycle has dominated, MEME culture has evolved into a “narrative black hole,” crazily devouring the entire market's attention towards “technological innovation.”

Imagine, when PumpFun creates tens of thousands of Shitcoin MEME coins every day, and a single MEME project can easily reach a market cap of 100M or even 2B, everyone has become accustomed to the thrill of zero-sum game PVP and has completely lost patience to understand what a decentralized Sequencer is, what Intent execution network means? What is a ZK Coprocessor? This has made many long-term Builder lose their “sense of existence” completely;

3. Moreover, the situation becomes even more critical when the liquidity-rich exit window is very short. Projects that are building steadily may fall behind due to established plans such as their Roadmap and Tokenomics design, while some VC-backed projects designed purely for narratives or self-created projects within exchanges will do everything possible to siphon off the liquidity that originally belongs to “value projects.”

When the real narrative project is built into a finished product, the market's liquidity has dried up, and the TGE immediately breaks, forcing investors to resort to market manipulation, engaging in insider trading, bearing all the blame, and exiting in the most undignified and embarrassing manner. It’s important to understand that without abundant liquidity and favorable conditions, the probability of a rally being justified is extremely low.

4. The key point is that true technological innovation requires a long time cycle for verification and to achieve Product-Market Fit (PMF), but the already changing market environment is fundamentally unfavorable for innovation to occur. A very realistic problem is that for a project to go from technical breakthroughs to product refinement and then to ecological implementation, it typically takes at least 2-3 years, or even spans multiple cycles to truly establish brand barriers. However, in the new environment, within the limited 3-month time window, everyone is racing to boost TVL, create hype, and rush for TGE. Who still has the patience to watch a project slowly verify PMF?

So the market is caught in an absurd cycle: true innovation takes time, but the market does not allow for it; those who adhere to long-termism are eliminated, while those who take shortcuts can cash out and leave.

Above.

Finally understood, what they have always hoped for is not a powerless “deep bear” once, but to completely eliminate those “noise bulls” that hinder true innovation.