Author: BowTied Bull; Compiled by: Vernacular Blockchain

With the arrival of 2025, at the turn of the old and the new, according to our habits, we will summarize the past and look forward to the future.

Looking back at the past time of the encryption industry, we can find an interesting phenomenon, that is, there will be a "copycat season" every four years. During this period, you will find that everything in the industry is rising. , chances are you’ve heard that your alcoholic uncle also made a fortune buying some animal emoticons, and even did so while drunk.

By 2025, it can be said that the real copycat season has not yet fully arrived. Although no one can predict how crazy this altcoin season will be, here I would like to remind everyone that the trend of the Altcoins market generally gets out of control quickly and may also end suddenly. Once it crashes, the decline may not only be -99.99%, but may even be a complete collapse.

But before that, everyone was immersed in an atmosphere of prosperity and entertainment. So, let’s look back at past copycat seasons and see how they developed. Can we learn any valuable lessons from them?

012012-2013 Copycat Season: Early Enthusiastic Investors with a Market Value of up to US$15 Billion

We know that those who blindly follow the trend in the current market are likely to appear again. This happened before in 2013, and the trend became very interesting.

During the "copycat season" of 2013, Bitcoin was still in its initial development stage, with a total market value of only about US$1 billion, and a whale transaction was only about US$100,000. At the time, CEX Mt. Gox was still operating, and the investors were mostly people who frequently appeared in Magic: The Gathering trading card events (which was also the background of the Mt. Gox incident).

At that time, people proposed the idea of ​​​​improving the transaction speed of Bitcoin, believing that transactions could be accelerated by reducing the block time. This was regarded as a far-reaching innovation at the time.

Litecoin: still exists today, and the whole idea (proposed by Charlie Lee) was to shorten the block time from Bitcoin's 10 minutes to 2.5 minutes.

The price of Litecoin rose from about 10 cents to 48 US dollars, an increase of about 47900%, and ushered in another huge increase in 2017, and then Charlie Lee sold off all positions at the top, claiming that " The Bitcoin network is just fine without him” (everyone knows what it means when a founder sells 100% of his holdings).

Namecoin: This is a fork of Bitcoin designed to create decentralized network names (similar to the concept of ENS via the ".eth" extension). Its price briefly surged to around $13, but it soon hit rock bottom. From its lowest point to its highest point, its price increased approximately 30 times. In fact, it still exists today, currently trading at close to $1. Peercoin (PPC): This is one of the earliest Proof-of-Stake tokens (a mechanism used today to ensure the security of ETH) and has experienced two major increases. The first time was in 2013 and the other time was in 2017 when the ETH ICO craze broke out. Its price once soared to about $7, an increase of 60-70 times. Naturally, it didn’t gain mainstream adoption and eventually dropped to $0.42. (But the next conclusion I want to make now is that, except for pure Ponzi schemes like Bitconnect or LUNA, nothing else on the market will really go to zero.)

Mania: Bitcoin finally reaches Above $1,200, these cryptocurrencies have surged on rising interest in crypto. Any project posted on BitcoinTalk can rise quickly based on speculation alone. The closest thing to this situation today may be Memecoin promoted by a celebrity or Memecoin named after a celebrity.

Mt. Gox Collapse: When Mt. Gox collapsed, the party was over. The crash was due to a major hack that sent Bitcoin prices down significantly, probably 85-90% (depending on how you look at the bottom), while Altcoins were down over 99%.

022017 Copycat Season: ICO frenzy and the rise of Ethereum, with a market value of up to US$800 billion

Many interesting events occurred during the subsequent bear market. Ethereum was born as a smart contract platform with the purpose of creating programmable money. This is a real innovation because it completely changes the entire game by allowing people to not only transfer tokens but also create smart contracts.

Like many things in the cryptocurrency space, Ethereum comes with some common risks. Ethereum's DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) was attacked by hackers, resulting in losses of more than $100 million, which eventually led to the blockchain forking, forming two chains, ETH and ETC. To this day, some people still think that the fork decision at that time was wrong, but we are not going to discuss this today, but simply review this period of history.

Around 2016, people realized that new tokens could be issued on the Ethereum blockchain, which gave rise to the first token issuance (1CO). In ICO, the project party directly sells Tokens to investors. In 2017, the ICO craze officially broke out, and many scam projects you can think of emerged at this time.

Ethereum (ETH): Since ETH is required to issue these tokens, it has driven the price of ETH skyrocketing, from about $8 to $1,400 in January 2018, which was almost unimaginable at the time return. Currently, ETH is trading at around $3,650.

Ripple (XRP): Ripple is still regarded as a "bank currency" and the theory is that Ripple will replace SWIFT (International Funds Clearing System) overnight and become the de facto financial standard. Even though Ripple is centralized (which most people don’t mind), it still attracts millions of dollars. Ripple’s price surged from around 1 cent to $3.80 and is currently trading at $2.41.

Oddly, Ripple’s investor base is still primarily retail investors. You can see a similar phenomenon during the recent surge - Ripple dominated TikTok, attracting a lot of discussion, and one even asked "What if its market cap reached the same level as Bitcoin" ?” This discussion about “a market value of four trillion US dollars” is somewhat bizarre.

Litecoin: As mentioned earlier, Litecoin once again rose, with the price once soaring to $360. Although Charlie Lee sold all his Litecoin, it still shot up to $384 again in 2021!

EOS: EOS raised $4 billion through ICO and calls itself the "Ethereum Killer". Its price briefly surged to $22, but has since failed to hit new highs.

NEO: Another self-proclaimed “Ethereum killer” project, it was dubbed the “Ethereum of ” when the price of NEO rose from $0.20 to $200, achieving a 1000x return .

Bitcoin Cash: Roger Ver was once a well-known figure in the Bitcoin circle. He participated in the large block debate and supported Bitcoin Cash. At block 478,559 in August 2017, users holding 1 Bitcoin would receive 1 Bitcoin Cash. The price of Bitcoin Cash surged to around $3,800 thanks to Roger Ver’s support, but has since faded away.

Other Ethereum killers: During this time, some other tokens were also promoted as "Ethereum killers" (such as ADA, Tron, etc.). If a certain Token has a "white paper", it seems that it can push its price to skyrocket by 10 times or 100 times. Other tokens, such as Filecoin and Tezos, also came online during this period.

Income scams: If you think BlockFi, LUNA, Celsius and Voyager are the first income scams, you are wrong! In fact, the first large-scale revenue Ponzi scheme was Bitconnect, and many people lost millions of dollars to it.

Regulators step in: Just like the 2021 cycle, regulators stepped in and the outbreak of Ponzi schemes once again devastated the entire industry. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) starts going after projects like EOSCurrently, the market has experienced a solid 85% correction, with the price of Bitcoin falling to approximately $3,500 by March 2020.

During that period, most Tokens were just scams, so the Altcoin market experienced a plunge of almost -99.999999%. At that time, if your token appeared in a Super Bowl commercial, its price could increase fivefold in an instant. For example, VIBE is a typical example.

VIBE’s price soared from US$0.04 to more than US$2, but its total market value eventually fell to only US$262.

032021 Copycat Season: DeFi, NFT and Memecoin have a market value of up to 3 trillion US dollars

In 2021, due to well-known reasons, everyone is working from home, staring at computers and mobile phones with nothing to do . The United States printed $10 trillion in currency, and that's just the United States' expenditures.

DeFi projects have promoted liquidity mining, NFTs have made JPEG images mainstream (sold for millions of dollars), and Memecoin’s valuation has reached ridiculous levels. Bitcoin surpassed $69,000, ETH reached $4,800, and the total cryptocurrency market cap exceeded $3 trillion in November 2021.

Dogecoin: It started as a joke, but as Elon Musk became interested in the coin, its price began to rise parabolically and it became a hot topic on the forum platform Reddit. Today, it’s almost Elon’s meme coin, representing the efficiency department. The price surged from about 0.5 cents to 74 cents, an increase of about 15,000%.

Solana: Touted as the next “Ethereum killer,” it has attracted a lot of attention with its fast transaction speeds and low fees. All this was mainly promoted by the SBF (now in prison). The price surged from $1 to approximately $260, an increase of 26,000%.

Shiba Inu: An emoticon coin that imitates Dogecoin and has created a large number of millionaires. If you look at it from a market capitalization of almost zero, it has gained 500,000%.

DeFi Token: DeFi Tokens such as AAVE, UNI, SUSHI, YFI, etc. have increased from 10 times to 50 times, and decentralized finance (DeFi) locked funds (TVL) have exceeded hundreds of billions of dollars. . Today, the TVL of many DeFi projects is even higher than it was back then!

NFTs:

CryptoPunks: Sold for millions of dollars, with the cheapest CryptoPunk costing over 100 ETH.

Boring Ape Yacht Club (BAYC): Became a cultural phenomenon with rock-bottom prices reaching incredible levels.

Airdrop Crazy: For old users of some projects, just haveA .eth domain name worth $100 can get you $40,000 in Airdrop. You can even earn 2% for a day or week by crossing a bridge (completing certain actions). NFT projects like BAYC have also Airdropped a large number of other series of high-valued NFTs, with the entire Airdrop worth billions of dollars.

What’s even crazier is...almost all tokens are rising, and tokens like SAFEMOON are highly praised by Dave Portnoy and others. Celebrities such as Snoop Dogg and Paris Hilton are also endorsing various projects. Tom Brady and Stephen Curry are promoting cryptocurrency exchanges. Even the defunct FTX spent money to buy the naming rights of the Miami Heat. FTX (now defunct) even purchased the naming rights to the NBA's Miami Heat.

Ponzi schemes: A large number of Ponzi schemes have emerged. While some have accused us of being involved in these scams, we are not. Fortunately, many people manage to avoid large losses. It is never wise to invest in these products and entrust your assets to others.

Death Spiral: As liquidity began to dry up (previous financial aid for these projects no longer appeared), we saw the collapse of the aforementioned Ponzi scheme. In addition, FTX collapsed due to stealing user funds, and then the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) once again took action to regulate. Various large-scale scams and leek-cutting incidents eventually led to a period of strict supervision for the entry and exit channels of the encryption industry.

04 Key Lessons

1) Profit in a timely manner: The market changes rapidly, and you are likely to feel greedy. If you find yourself saying, "I really wish I could buy 2x more of such-and-such Token," then what you should probably do is sell half of your position and be content to earn profits. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling Bitcoin, Ethereum or stablecoins, the point is not to be greedy.

2) The hype cycle is repetitive: each round of altcoin season has a narrative theme: Bitcoin fork, ICO, DeFi, NFT or Memecoin. If you find a topic, it's best to stick with it, because the knowledge you accumulate in that area tends to disappear quickly at the end of the cycle. Instead of jumping around, focus on one area and emerge victorious.

3) Risk management is crucial: The benefits are very substantial, but everyone’s situation is different. You are different from me, and I am different from my neighbor. Make a plan that works for you and stick to it. Don't keep adjusting your goals just because someone with $100,000 says, "$10 million isn't enough to retire."

4) Survivors will thrive: Altcoins come and go, but Bitcoin and Ethereum dominate every cycle. If a project has been around for that long, the risk of it going to zero is relatively low.If Solana can find practical applications beyond Pump.fun in 2025, it may come close.

Have we learned anything from Ponzi schemes? Actually no. From what we’ve seen, people still don’t understand the concept of “Not Your Keys, Not Your Coins” where you can buy crypto stocks or other crypto leverage at a brokerage Asset investing, but understand that if you hold these stocks or cryptocurrency ETFs, you don't actually own any cryptocurrency. You also never know what these companies or projects will do with the assets you invest.

During bull markets, we are often criticized for not participating in the hype surrounding the latest Memecoin. Although these speculations seem to be very hot at the moment, if you observe carefully, you will find that those who stick to their strategies and stay calm have gradually accumulated.

In contrast, those speculators who only want to get rich quickly through "10 times earnings" may receive the attention of the market in the short term, but their amount of funds and strategies are far from enough. Compared with those anonymous large investors who continue to invest steadily every month and accumulate wealth. These large investors usually have a stronger financial foundation and clearer long-term plans. Ultimately, market performance and data will prove what strategy is the key to success.

Finally, I wish everyone good luck in 2025.