1. Enjoy the price of freedom, but also protect yourself

Some summaries, not investment advice.

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

In 2021, DeFi rose, and the actual market began to diversify and divert. As long as you run fast, you can make money.

At that time, IEO could also negotiate with the project party to release a part of the shares to users, so the general pricing was low when it went online, and buying new instead of old was also a typical feature of this period.

But now IEO is generally considered to have legal risks in most countries, so it can only be airdropped and market-priced, which means that if the circulation is large and the opening price is low, the project will perform relatively steadily, such as BB and Lista, but compared with 21 years, it is still too fast and lacks a sufficient wash process.

The rise in 2024 was initiated by BTC ETF. The smart money in this wave belongs to the king-level projects and Lumao Studio. 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 a billion US dollars, which will indeed push up the pricing of good projects), and on the other hand, the project parties with money and users are full of confidence. There are millions of users on the chain. It doesn’t matter if they don’t go on a certain platform. There are many CEXs to go on. If there is no CEX, there are still DEXs. At worst, there are Dexes on their own chains.

Trading platforms do not have pricing power, so for projects with high valuations, everyone should look at the fundamentals, not just the market value, but also the circulation.

Today, the market has indeed changed again. The fratricide between Lumao Studio and L2 projects has turned into a farce, and the Lumao era may be coming to an end. At present, 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 2023 strategy of making money may not be suitable for today's market.

Is it a healthier market if there is a lack of VC investment and fewer project parties? In every cycle, there will be some projects that cross the bull and bear markets, and there are also countless king-level projects that fall on the road. Whether it is web2 or web3, there are very few successful startups, and projects that cross the gap and cross the cycle are even rarer.

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