Deep Bear and Noise Bull

Written by: 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 “pseudo-innovation” craze of 2023, to the BTC layer 2 narrative where East and West VCs do not buy each other out, to the AI Agent MEME asset issuance narrative that has surged on Solana, and then to the series of artificial domestic bull markets stirred up by BN, the entire bull market has been fragmented into waves of brief attention nodes: lively but short-lived, leaving a mess behind.

It can be considered that “True Bull” has come from the future, and it can also be said that “False Bull” has never left, but the “Super Bull” that everyone was familiar with, such as DeFi Summer and the breakthrough of NFTs, which could drive incremental growth outside of the market through innovation within the market, has become unattainable.

2. What frustrates Builders the most is that when the voices promoting the MEME Super Cycle dominate, the MEME culture has evolved into a “narrative black hole,” crazily devouring the entire market's attention on “technological innovation.”

Imagine, when PumpFun generates tens of thousands of土狗 MEME coins daily, and a 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, completely lacking the patience to understand what decentralized Sequencer means, what Intent execution network means? What ZK Coprocessor means? This has caused many long-term Builders to completely lose their “sense of existence”;

3. What's even more critical is that, due to the abundant liquidity, the exit time window is very short. Projects that are building steadily may end up lagging behind because of their established plans like roadmap and tokenomics design, while some VC-backed projects designed specifically for narrative or ecosystem projects within exchanges will try every means to siphon off the liquidity that originally belongs to “value projects.”

When the real narrative projects are built into finished products, the market has already run dry of liquidity, and the TGE breaks immediately, forcing investors to resort to manipulating the market and engaging in insider trading, bearing all the blame and exiting in the most undignified manner. It is important to understand that without abundant liquidity and favorable conditions, the odds of a pump being justified are one in a million.

4. The key is that true technological innovation requires a long time cycle for verification and to establish PMF, but the changing market environment is fundamentally unfavorable for innovation to occur. The realistic issue is that a project takes at least 2-3 years from technical breakthroughs to product refinement and then to ecological implementation, and it may even require crossing cycles to truly establish brand barriers. However, in the new environment, with only a 3-month time window, everyone is rushing to boost TVL, create hype, and strive for TGE. Who still has the patience to see projects slowly validate PMF?

So the market has inevitably fallen into an absurd cycle: true innovation takes time, but the market does not allow for time; those who adhere to long-termism are eliminated, while those who take shortcuts are able to cash out and leave.

Above.

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