Nearly 30 million tokens were produced in two years. Cryptocurrency is a huge coin factory.

Author: flowie, ChainCatcher

If you are still looking forward to altcoins, you may lose some illusions after seeing this set of data.

According to the dune panel data statistics created by @cgrogan, the number of crypto tokens has increased from more than 3.4 million in 2022 to more than 39 million in 2025. In 2024 and 2023, the crypto market created more than 10.09 million and 18.7 million tokens each year, respectively.

In sharp contrast to the explosive growth of altcoins in this bull market, the number of cryptocurrency developers has not increased but decreased. Electric Capital's "Cryptocurrency Developer Report" shows that the total number of crypto developers fell by 7% and 24% in 2024 and 2023 respectively.

The crypto market has long been undisguised as a huge "coin issuance" factory. Apart from the coin issuance model and the promotion of casinos, new paradigm innovations are basically not seen here.

The other side of fairness and getting rich overnight is the extremely low cost of doing evil and a large number of ordinary users who have been defrauded. In long-term PvP, all important participants, including users, are educated to be smart short-termists.

Leave or wait for a turnaround

Yesterday, the cryptocurrency panic and greed index fell to 10, the lowest level since June 2022. @ZKSgu refuted Crypto's call for externalities, saying, "No one in the market can stay."

As the most criticized participants in this round of bull market, exchanges and VCs are looking for opportunities to leave or are forced to leave.

The old crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX is seeking to sell. According to people familiar with the matter who told ChainCatcher, the largest crypto options exchange Deribit may have completed a merger and acquisition agreement, and the amount of the merger and acquisition may be as high as US$5 billion.

Not only exchanges, but the entire crypto field is ushering in a wave of mergers and acquisitions. According to RootData data, there have been more than 20 M&A events in the crypto space in the two months from 2025 to now, with an average of more than 10 crypto M&A events per month.

A large number of VCs are facing elimination. YettaS's biggest feeling at Consensus HK was that VCs were in mourning: some VCs could not raise the next round of funds, some VCs had half of their people gone, some VCs turned to strategic investment instead of independent investment, and some VCs even considered sending memes to raise funds.

And investor @26x14eth began to call on young people not to spend their most precious time on gold rush in the currency circle, but to go to the potential AI and robotics industries for internships if they have the opportunity. Because this is not the cycle of 2017-2021 when everyone can make money, and the most valuable wealth at the moment is time.

But some people are waiting for a turnaround. Crypto KOL @cmdefi is not so pessimistic. He feels that the current market is like 2018-2019. After the ICO bubble burst, everyone felt that this market had no hope and was full of scams.

"But DeFi Summer is coming in 2020, speculative funds are decreasing, and the market is more focused on application innovation. Stay in the game. (Wait for a turnaround)."

The assembly line coin is "sucking blood" crazily

This bull market is indeed hell-level difficult.

There is almost no surprising crypto construction. From Trump's "harvesting" trend of celebrity coins, Pi coin's listing on the big exchange to the recent hacker attack on Safe, everyone just woke up from their dreams and realized that the encryption system is so absurd and vulnerable.

The current state of the crypto ecosystem drawn by overseas KOL @sherlock resonated with the market. In addition to the shaky crypto construction, conspiracy groups can be seen everywhere.

In this bull market, money is even harder to make.

Players who have experienced the baptism of the last bull market may be particularly painful. Binance and other places where wealth myths were created in the last round have become dumping grounds for the project's big dog coins. The so-called alpha listing is the peak. Presto Research counted the tokens launched on Binance in the first month of 2025, and 100% of them fell by more than 70%.

If you are a beta diamond hand holding the top 20 in market value, you will no longer be rewarded. From July 2024 to date, the top 20 tokens by market value have generally fallen by more than 60%. The PVP players also lamented that they could not escape being reversed no matter how much they rolled and upgraded.

The seemingly fairer on-chain PVP is even more of a mess.

As of February 26, the number of tokens issued by the Pump.fun platform exceeded 8.1 million, the number of Meme coins with a market value of more than 100 million US dollars was nearly 32, and the number of Meme coins with a market value of more than 10 million US dollars was only 154. Now, after the scandals of celebrity coins such as Libra, on-chain PVP has also come to an end.

Without actual crypto construction, most people can't make money, so where does the money go?

Conflux co-founder Yuanjie may have told the truth. Except for a very few smart and lucky people, most of the money went to the various stakeholders of the "assembly line coin issuance".

Yuanjie shared on Twitter, "The 'coin issuance factory' not only has VCs, serial entrepreneurs, market makers, OL agencies, studios, big investors, exchanges, but also a complete assembly line link, sucking the industry and leeks like a vampire."

In the crypto market, coin making and selling coins is the biggest business model.

In Yuanjie's view, under the "coin issuance factory" model, the wealth creation process of the project party is mainly concentrated in the two core links of chip allocation and listing. The model of coin issuance on this assembly line is:

1. Find founders endorsed by the core circle (such as Vitalik, A16Z, Binance, etc.) or meme leaders with great influence to get low-priced chips 

2. Fabricate a beautiful narrative and use artificial data (TVL, on-chain data, node scale, etc.)

3. Interest-binding Kol Group to complete Twitter Shilling (promotion)

4. Hunting down the core decision-makers who influence the listing (how one) to complete the finishing touch

5. After listing, start dumping through market makers and repeat the above steps to concoct the next project.

An investor in Web2 and Web3 also told ChainCatcher that because there is no R&D investment and the team does not need to support a few people, as long as the coin is listed and harvested, it will not die. "The market elimination mechanism has completely failed, and the number of junk projects and tokens continues to increase."

But when ordinary users are no longer easily deceived by the "narrative" routines of the project party and VC conspiracy, the more brutal meme coin-making model has appeared. The same methodology, just without VC.

Behind the fair issuance of coins with almost no threshold, there is an extremely low cost of doing evil. Primitive Crypto investment partner @YettaSing believes that the Meme model is essentially a darker on-chain world than the VC model. Due to the lack of product and technical support, "absolute fairness" is often just a cover. Scandals of celebrity coins such as Libra have unveiled the last fig leaf of meme.

Where should the first shot of change be fired?

The wealth effect has failed everywhere, and the industry has begun to collectively reflect and hold accountable.

Recent public opinion has once again attacked the Lumao studio. Crypto kol@mscryptojiayi believes that the altcoin cannot raise its head, and it can be traced back to the moment when the "bribery system" prevailed. The first shot of industry change should be fired at the Lumao studio.

In her opinion, the studio and the project party "conspired" to build the industry's "false prosperity", which not only diluted the expected returns of ordinary users, weakened the long-term loyalty of users to the project, and caused the community to degenerate from a value community to a profit trading market, but also laid mines for the secondary market crash.

She criticized that there are even many studios that have no bottom line and conspire with fraudulent projects, and implement shameless behaviors of jointly building rat warehouses and deceiving exchanges and users.

But IceFrog @Ice_Frog666666, a kol in the airdrop track, refuted it. He believes that "false prosperity" is the result of the distorted development of the industry, but not the cause. The studio is not the biggest vested interest and the rule maker. If the knife does not cut the biggest vested interest and the rule maker, the reform is doomed to be ineffective.

In addition to the wool studio, this round of bull market is considered to be the other two vested interests that conspired with the project party. VC and CEX are the targets of siege many times.

During the Hong Kong Consensus Conference, a Crypto VC even criticized the chaos of junk coins flying around, saying that "90% of VCs should close down."

The rise of VC coins also stems from the fact that there are too many crypto scams after ICO. After VC screening and endorsement, the projects are gradually recognized by retail investors.

It’s just that the leader of this retail investor has lost trust. Retail investors believe that VC can obtain chips at a lower cost and have information advantages, and they conspire with project parties to dump tokens and harvest users.

In this round of bull market, VC coins are generally overvalued and under-circulated, resulting in a crash as soon as they are listed, which is also the source of dissatisfaction among community users.

He Yi also responded to the controversy over listing coins in last year’s AMA, saying bluntly that "some VCs are indeed the core reason for the inflated prices."

Ordinary retail investors are always the ones who get hurt.

As the most powerful link in wealth creation, exchanges are naturally considered to be to blame by the market.

Binance, Coinbase and other mainstream exchanges have been frequently besieged by controversy over listing coins in the past year. Moonrock Capital CEO Simon once regarded CEX's sky-high listing fees as the biggest reason for the project's inability to afford and the loss of market liquidity.

Although He Yi later denied the sky-high "listing fees", CEX's listing mechanism and "girlfriend group" insider trading have always been questioned as one of the culprits of the bloodsucking on junk projects.

Although He Yi has repeatedly stated that Binance has a transparent and complex listing process, the meme TST on the BNB chain was quickly launched recently and immediately crashed the market. Even Zhao Changpeng began to question Binance's listing issues.

Not only exchanges and VCs, almost any beneficiary on the "coin factory" can be "revolutionized". Crypto kol @CyberPhilos believes that the three major termites in the Crypto world are KOL Agency and market makers in addition to CEX.

Bill said that Web3 venture capital and Web2 venture capital follow completely different logics. The former emphasizes that "early fame is the key", and the model of rapid wealth creation prompts founders to chase trends, focus on marketing and quickly list on exchanges.

In Bill's view, Web3 actually needs more "patient capital" - venture capital that adopts a Web2-style approach and supports founders to build long-term value in major markets, so that the team can focus on product development instead of rushing to cash out.

The dilemma of CEX listing may also be due to the premature cashing out of the wealth of the project party. @0x_Todd believes that compared with the public offering of the traditional Web2 market, the problem with the Crypto protocol is that it enjoys the benefits of traditional listing: investors exit/motivate employees, but do not bear any traditional listing obligations.

The lack of crypto regulation is also the key to the problem. @0x_Todd said that all means such as "bribery, fraud, volume manipulation, and deception" should be used because there will be no punishment.

Currently, the panic of cryptocurrencies has reached an extreme point. Although everyone is holding themselves accountable and reflecting, they are collectively trapped. Whether the industry can really "scrape the bone to heal the wound" and usher in the time of clearing is still unknown.