What will still be available for trading in the crypto market a year from now?

This weekend, beset by internal and external troubles, the crypto market suffered another bloodbath. BTC is currently hovering around the Strategy holding cost of $76,000, while altcoins seem to be looking to self-destruct at the mere sight of their prices. Behind this current slump, after recent conversations with projects, funds, and trading platforms, one question has been repeatedly on my mind: What will the crypto market be trading a year from now? And the more fundamental question behind this is: If the primary market no longer produces "future secondary markets," what will the secondary market be trading a year from now? What changes will occur in trading platforms? Although the death of altcoins is a well-worn refrain, the market hasn't lacked projects in the past year. Projects are still queuing up for TGE every day, and as media, we are still frequently engaging with project teams in their marketing and promotion. (Note that in this context, when we talk about "projects," we are mostly referring to "project teams" in a narrow sense. Simply put, these are projects that benchmark against Ethereum and its ecosystem—underlying infrastructure and various decentralized applications—and are "token-issuing projects." This is the cornerstone of what our industry calls native innovation and entrepreneurship. Therefore, we will leave aside Meme and other platforms that have emerged from traditional industries venturing into crypto for now.) If we rewind the timeline a bit, we'll find a fact we've been avoiding discussing: these projects about to achieve TGE are all "existing, established projects." Most of them raised funds 1-3 years ago, and now they've finally reached the point of token issuance, or even, under internal and external pressure, they've been forced to take this step. This seems like a form of "industry destocking," or to put it more bluntly, queuing up to complete their lifecycle, issuing tokens, giving the team and investors an explanation, and then lying low and waiting for death, or spending their money in the bank hoping for a miraculous turnaround. The first tier is dead. For "veterans" like us who entered the industry in the ICO era or even earlier, experienced several bull and bear market cycles, and witnessed the industry's benefits empowering countless individuals, subconsciously, we always feel that given enough time, a new cycle, new projects, new narratives, and new TGEs will eventually emerge. However, the reality is that we are already far from our comfort zone. Let's look at the data directly. In the most recent four-year period (2022-2025), excluding special primary market activities such as mergers and acquisitions, IPOs, and public fundraising, the number of financing deals in the crypto industry showed a significant downward trend (1639 ➡️ 1071 ➡️ 1050 ➡️ 829). The reality is even worse than the data suggests; the changes in the primary market are not only a reduction in overall amount but also a structural collapse. Over the past four years, the number of early-stage funding rounds (including angel, pre-seed, and seed rounds), representing fresh blood for the industry, decreased by 63.9% from 825 to 298. This represents a larger decline than the overall market decline (49.4%), indicating a shrinking capacity of the primary market to provide funding to the industry. A few sectors showing an upward trend in funding rounds are financial services, trading platforms, asset management, payments, and AI-related cryptographic technologies, but these have limited practical relevance to us; frankly, the vast majority will not "issue tokens." Conversely, the decline in funding for native "projects" such as L1, L2, DeFi, and social networking is even more significant.

Odaily Note: Chart source: Crypto Fundraising

One ​​easily misinterpreted data point is that while the number of funding rounds has decreased significantly, the amount of each round has increased. This is mainly due to the fact that, as mentioned earlier, "large projects" have captured a large amount of funds from the traditional financial sector, greatly raising the average. In addition, mainstream VCs tend to increase their bets on a small number of "super projects," such as Polymarket's multiple rounds of funding exceeding hundreds of millions of dollars.