Deep Bear and Noise Bull

Author: haotian

After chatting with some Builders, I was surprised to find that they weren't pessimistic about the arrival of the bear market; on the contrary, they hoped that the "deep bear" could last longer. Why? I tried to figure out their psychology:

1) From the inscription "pseudo-innovation" craze in 2023, to the BTC layer 2 narrative where Eastern and Western VCs wouldn't take over, to the AI ​​Agent MEME asset issuance narrative sparked on Solana, and then to the series of artificially created internal bull markets sparked by BN, the entire bull market was fragmented into waves of short-lived attention nodes: lively but short-lived, and then leaving a mess.

It can be argued that a "real bull" has never existed, or that a "fake bull" has never left, but the "super bull" phenomena that everyone was once familiar with—such as DeFi Summer and NFT's expansion into new markets—which could drive incremental growth outside the market through innovation within the market, have become unattainable.

2) What makes Builders most desperate is that, after the voices promoting MEME Super Cycle became dominant, MEME culture has evolved into a "narrative black hole," frantically devouring the entire market's attention to "technological innovation."

Imagine, when PumpFun generates tens of thousands of MEME coins every day, and a MEME project can easily reach a market capitalization of 100M or even 2B, everyone is used to the thrill of zero-sum PVP games and has no patience to understand what a decentralized Sequencer, an Intent execution network, or a ZK Coprocessor are.

This has caused many long-term builder projects to completely lose their "presence"; 3) Even more critically, due to the short exit window with ample liquidity, projects with solid builds are often delayed due to pre-defined plans such as roadmaps and tokenomics design. Meanwhile, some VC-backed projects designed specifically for narratives or self-created ecosystem projects within exchanges will try every means to absorb the liquidity that originally belonged to "value projects." By the time the real narrative projects are built, market liquidity has dried up, TGE immediately falls below its initial offering price, and they are forced to abandon their projects altogether, revealing investors' market manipulation and insider trading teams, bearing all the blame, and exiting in the most undignified way. It's important to understand that without ample liquidity and favorable market conditions, the probability of a pump-and-dump scheme succeeding is extremely low. 4) Crucially, genuine technological innovation requires a long period to validate and implement Profitability Factors (PMFs). However, the changed market environment is fundamentally unfavorable for innovation. A very real problem is that a project, from technical breakthroughs to product refinement and ecosystem implementation, normally takes at least 2-3 years, or even longer, to truly establish a brand barrier. But in the new environment, with only a 3-month window, everyone is rushing to boost TVL, generate buzz, and achieve TGE (Total Productivity). Who has the patience to watch a project slowly validate its PMF? Therefore, the market is helplessly trapped in an absurd cycle: genuine innovation needs time, but the market doesn't give it time; those who adhere to long-termism are eliminated, while those who engage in speculation can cash out and leave. That's all. Now I understand. What they really wanted was never a powerless "deep bear market," but rather to completely eliminate the "noise bulls" that hinder genuine innovation.