#市场调整与情绪 After reading Messari's 100,000-word report, I keep asking myself one question: why do we all feel that 2025 will be particularly tough, yet the system itself hasn't truly collapsed?

The answer might be more painful than we think.

This isn't just a market cycle issue, but a mismatch in participation roles. Remember 2017? Back then, if you were early enough and aggressive enough, you could earn outsized returns. Narrative rotation, ecosystem stories, high volatility for high yields—this logic has worked for over a decade. But 2025 has broken it systematically for the first time.

What’s truly painful is that this break isn’t because the market is bad, but because the market is becoming more mature. When ETFs come in, DAT becomes standard, and regulatory frameworks become clearer, the game rules have changed. Institutional experience is extremely clear and comfortable, but the old participation method—driven by information asymmetry and emotion—has failed.

I looked at that government debt chart. The US at 120.8%, Japan at 236.7%—debt outpacing growth has become a global consensus. When savings are systematically sacrificed, and people realize that working hard no longer preserves wealth, what crypto is really doing isn’t promising higher returns, but offering an alternative: rules are predictable, monetary policy isn’t arbitrarily changed by a single institution, and assets can be self-custodied.

Then you'll see that the market prices 81% of assets as "money." BTC grew from 318 billion to 1.81 trillion, while most L1 ecosystem data increased 20-30 times, yet prices could only keep pace. This isn’t about who wins or loses; it’s the market reclassifying—telling you that in a high-debt, low-uncertainty world, it only needs one kind of "money" in the true sense.

Pain comes from illusion. We think "not making money" means "the industry is failing," but actually it just shows we participated with the wrong role. Former short-term alpha seekers now need to learn to be long-term allocators and store-of-value providers. This isn’t a capability issue; it’s a role switch happening in our era.

Looking at past cycles, those who truly survived were never the best storytellers, but those who first recognized change and adjusted their roles early. The emotional collapse in 2025 might be the last elimination before the next decade begins.