The Crypto World Has Changed: From the "Reckless Legend" to the "Age of Oligarchs"

The crypto market in 2021 is like a wild western gold rush, and the air is filled with the smoke of the myth of getting rich. AC brought his "holy grail" Yearn Finance out of the encirclement, SBF held high the banner of the Solana ecosystem to conquer the city, and DeFi protocols wrote wealth codes in code. SHIB, the joke coin of Shiba Inu's avatar, has skyrocketed millions of times with the blessing of Musk's tweet, and the chain game project has used the token economic model to create BNX, RACA, and other hundred-fold magic disks under the banner of "playing and earning". At that time, in the currency circle, there were people who used thousands of dollars to make tens of millions of dollars every day.

Now open the market software, Bitcoin is still soaring, but the entire crypto world has fallen into an eerie silence. AC faded out of public view, SBF is awaiting a 115-year sentence in prison, and Musk swapped Dogecoin for Trump tokens. When the former president of the United States issued MAGA Coin on NFT trading platforms, when the Kardashian family made selfies into MEME coins to harvest fans, and when Wall Street institutions used Bitcoin ETFs to siphon up 90% of the market's liquidity, we suddenly found that the rules of the game in the crypto world have completely changed.

The Regulatory Iron Curtain is reshaping the industry landscape. The SEC's litigation stick has put any innovative project on thin ice, and DeFi protocols that once thrived wildly have either emasculated themselves into "compliant products" or gone underground to become dark web casinos. Institutional investors come in with a compliance team, and they only recognize Bitcoin as "digital gold", and other tokens are in their eyes a regulatory landmine that can detonate at any time. Even the once craziest MEME coins now have to put on the cloak of "community building" to survive.

The coming-of-age lily in the crypto market came unexpectedly. When grassroots geeks take center stage, when presidential candidates start issuing tokens to canvass for votes, when Bitcoin ETFs surpass the Nasdaq-100 index in a single day, this once idealistic decentralized experiment has not escaped the fate of being co-opted by the traditional world. Perhaps this is the fate of the technological revolution: all dragon-slaying teenagers will eventually become the evil dragons they once fought against.