Source: Hua Li Hua Wai
In this cycle, we have witnessed too many changes or new incredible things, such as:
1.MemeCoin Season seems to have replaced the previous Altcoin Season.
2. Although Bitcoin has reached the $100,000 milestone and has broken through historical highs many times, the king of altcoins ETH has not even surpassed its historical highs in this bull market, and the current price of ETH is the same as 4 years ago.
3. The number of projects (tokens) has increased exponentially.
For example, in March 2021, there were 350,000 tokens in the crypto market, by March 2022, there were 4 million tokens in the market, and in March 2025, the total number of tokens exceeded 40 million. At the current development speed, it is estimated that by 2026, the number of tokens on the market may exceed 100 million. As shown in the figure below.
4. In 2024, the BTC ETF was finally officially approved, and the ETH ETF was also approved. Currently, more ETFs such as DOGE, XRP, LTC, SOL, ADA are still under application for review (but now the SEC has postponed the approval of these altcoin ETFs. Combined with the overall market performance, the probability of passing the relay in the second half of this year may be greater).
5. In 2025, the United States will add Bitcoin to the Strategic Reserves Plan (Executive Order).
6. Institutions actively hoard Bitcoin and some altcoins.
Although in the last cycle, major institutions such as Grayscale had already entered the market, and we also experienced the entry of institutions such as Tesla, and Musk continued to milk, but starting from this cycle, the participation methods of major institutions have been relatively reversed and become more extensive, such as the large institutions such as MicroStrategy and BlackRock that we have seen.
Of course, in addition to Bitcoin, some other altcoins have also begun to be favored and laid out by some institutions. For example, WLFI (WorldFree Finance, a DeFi project supported by the Trump family, has been buying (some tokens are not ruled out to be sponsored) tokens such as ETH, ONDO, MOVE, ENA, LINK, AAVE and other tokens this year. As shown in the figure below.
It seems that we have been following the laws of historical cycles while constantly witnessing some new differences or new history. From an investment perspective, some old investors who insist on investing thinking seem to suffer losses in this cycle, especially those who insist on focusing all their investments on altcoin value investment strategies. A few days ago, I saw a representative report saying that a whale built a position of PENDLE eight months ago, but it seemed that it could not last until this month and may have sold it at a loss. As shown in the figure below.
Of course, this is what the old man above does. It is obvious that the old leeks may still insist on holding altcoins with a drop of more than 80%. They are currently in a dilemma, such as not willing to stop losses directly, and feel that they can't make a profit after switching to Bitcoin... In fact, it is difficult for anyone to give up when facing such an ending. As for what to do, we gave some of our thoughts and suggestions from a long-term and short-term perspective in our article on March 11. Interested friends can go back and read the corresponding article directly, so I won’t go into details here.
Let the macro factors aside first. As for the crypto market itself, from the current overall market environment, it seems that people (including institutions) pay attention to Bitcoin (those who are damaged or not damaged in this cycle basically re-plan to pay attention to Bitcoin for a long time) are unlikely to trigger a similar "upward" trend in Bitcoin, because sometimes excessive attention will form a certain amount of pressure, and this "pressure" leverage may make it difficult for Bitcoin to restore its dominance (even cannot even continue to rise), prompting more people to turn to Bitcoin (now more and more people already believe that investing in Bitcoin is better than investing in other altcoins), and more and more people will take the initiative to take over when Bitcoin falls back...
While the new changes + new models of the above market, it seems that it is difficult for us to see the traditional altcoin peak season (that is, after Bitcoin reaches a certain historical high, its dominance begins to decline, and then a scene of altcoins flying together appears). From this cycle on, the so-called altcoin season seems to have been staged by MemeCoThe rapid rise and fall of specific altcoin seasons (or what we can call mini altcoin seasons) in the in-season, Trump season, AI season, etc.
Can we still see the traditional altcoin season of "ten thousand tokens flying together"? I think this comprehensive altcoin season is already very difficult. You can't make 10 million tokens rise several times or dozens of times at the same time!
Along with the fundamental changes in liquidity, the crypto market has injected a lot of liquidity (new money), supporting the logic that all altcoins can rise together again.
But the next mini altcoin season will still appear, it's just a matter of time. If you are still interested in altcoins and don’t want to spend too much time and energy on project research or participating in PvP games, then you only focus on exploring projects with strong fundamentals, such as projects that can generate continuous revenue, projects that are good in token economics, projects that can sustainably build and have a vision of development... The easiest way is to directly select from the top 100 market capitalizations.
It can be predicted that in the future liquidity will still be mainly concentrated on BTC and a few altcoins. The liquidity of most altcoins may face a shortage or continue to decrease. The massive altcoins (plus many VC projects constantly unlock tokens at the source) makes liquidity more diversified. For this fundamental problem, we can only continue to wait patiently for internal refresh (that is, innovation within the crypto market, but I can't see it for the time being), changes in some macro factors (such as the expected interest rate cut in June this year, and the new US crypto industry this year, etc.), to form a quantitative solution to internal problems in the crypto market.
I remember people often say this: History will not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
We need to understand this sentence reasonably. The so-called rhyme does not mean that we can directly search for swords on the ship. As the author of this article said, although the market cycle exists according to certain rules, the market is also constantly evolving. Some scenarios from the previous cycle may not be completely applicable at present. We need to keep pace with the times and constantly adapt to and study new scenarios of the current cycle.
At this stage, everyone has a big disagreement. Some people think that the market has completely begun a bear market, some people think that it is just a technical adjustment (the biggest bull market is still ahead), and some people think that the bull market has just begun. As for my personal opinion, there are alreadyShared in a series of articles. I think there may be some new opportunities this year (but not large-scale opportunities), but I can't see things that are too far away before. Now let’s look at the possible situation in May and June this year.