Author: He Yi

Some summary, not investment advice.

2017 is the ICO era, and public fundraising directly replaced VC and PE, so the bull market in 2017-2018 belongs to OG platforms and proxy investment. As long as you grab a share, you can make money.

With the rise of DeFi in 2021, the actual market has begun to diversify. As long as you run fast, you can make money.

At that time, IEO could still negotiate with the project party to release a portion of the shares to users, so the general online pricing was low. Buying new rather than old was also a typical feature of this period.

However, IEO compliance in most countries is generally considered to have legal risks, so it can only be airdropped and market-priced, which means that if the circulation volume is large and the opening price is low, the project will perform relatively steadily, such as BB and Lista. However, compared with 2021, the price has risen too fast and there is a lack of sufficient wash-out process.

The rise in 2024 was initiated by BTC ETF. The smart money in this wave belongs to the king-level projects and hair-pulling studios. They love each other and have created a wave of beautiful data together. On the one hand, the project parties can raise more money from VCs (if you observe the top VCs in the market, they are all over one billion US dollars in scale, which will indeed push up the pricing of good projects), and on the other hand, the project parties who have both money and users are full of confidence. There are millions of users on the chain, and it doesn’t matter if they are not on a certain platform. Most of them want to be on CEX. If there is no CEX, there is DEX. At worst, there is Dex on their own chain.

The trading platform does not have the pricing power, so for projects with high valuations, it is better to look at the fundamentals instead of just the market value. It is better to look at the circulation volume.

Today, the market has indeed changed again. The internal fighting between LuMao Studio and L2 project has turned into a farce, and the LuMao era may be coming to an end. Currently, there are more professional players in both the primary and secondary markets. They have various tools to hedge risks, but they have also expanded the market size. As an ordinary investor, the ICO in 2017, the IEO in 2021, the nesting dolls, and even the LuMao strategy in 2023 may not be suitable for today's market.

Would a lack of VC investment and fewer project parties make the market healthier? In every cycle, there are some projects that survive the bull and bear markets, and countless top-level projects fail along the way. Whether it is Web2 or Web3, successful startups are rare, and projects that cross the gap and survive the cycle are even rarer.

Investing is risky, so be cautious when entering the market.