Why I’m so bearish regarding the crypto market
For about six months, I’ve typed doom and gloom to deaf ears - or worse, I’ve been ripped on and laughed at for pointing out that crypto is unsustainably oversaturated (way too many projects), and the money has been so diluted, barely anything can get any traction and most alts have insanely inflated market caps.
This is very similar to when I was ripped on for calling the dotcom implosion way back when the first iteration of the modern Web was a bunch of sites with no revenue stream possibilities - and most had ridiculously unrealistic expectations.
(It’s like Déjà vu seeing the “if you build it, they will come” mentality that is pervasive in crypto - and was back then as well.)
Crypto is in far worse shape than Internet companies before the dotcom implosion - this contraction and reset will be more significant.
Here are some “lowlights” right now:
CoinGecko studied ~20.2 million tokens and more than half are no longer trading.
We all know there are many useless tokens being spewed from these shit-coin factories - with no hope of survival - but tens of millions?
About 11.6 million of those deaths were in 2025 alone.
This latest RobinHood - supposed local bull market or bullish activity - is merely a desperation ploy by scammers and the dumb dumbs that give them money. It is completely unsustainable and activity will drop like a rock very soon (If it hasn’t by the time I typed this).
Pump.fun-style tokens often die day one: one tracker put ~69% of bonding-curve last trades were on launch day.
Among coins that once made the top 100, CryptoRank later classified 71.9% as effectively inactive, with an average top-100 lifespan of about two years and four months.
Entire chains have been sunset: Harmony (ONE), ICON, Dogechain, Router Chain - among others.
L2s that are gone include: Polygon zkEVM, Moonbeam (Polkadot parachain), Botanix (Bitcoin L2 / Spiderchain) - and many more.
Wallets have been dropping support for long-tail networks (such as Trust Wallet dropping built-in support for 25 networks including Agoric, Aurora, Boba, Moonbeam, MultiversX, Polygon zkEVM, Viction, Wanchain).
DefiLlama’s 2026 wind-down writeup said the largest cohort of announced shutdowns was L1s and L2s, and most of the apps that died were sitting on Ethereum. “No product-market fit” was the #1 stated reason.
Significant projects on significant chains that sunset:
• Balancer — this week. Once over $3B TVL (2021).
• Loopring — first production zk-rollup DEX on Ethereum. Team’s post-mortem: never got real adoption.
• Radiant Capital, Goldfinch, Ionic, Odos, Carrot, Step Finance,
Summer.fi, Angle, and a pile of perp DEXs (Rage Trade, Vela, Satori, etc.).
Several exchanges and many games have shut down - this is bad.
Now, here is the uncomfortable part for prices:
If the long tail dies and no new speculative float replaces it, two things happen at once:
1. Alt liquidity gets worse, not better. Survivors do not inherit the dead coins’ volume. Volume was fake depth from incentives.
2. The only reliable bid left is the one already concentrated: BTC, stables, and whatever still prints fees.
That is a market that can grind, chop, or go nowhere for a long time while people sell into a thinner and thinner book. It is not automatically a crash of Bitcoin to zero, and it is not an altseason. It is what a liquidation of “tourist capital” looks like when the tourists do not come back.
Another uncomfortable truth about this industry is the $2.7 trillion market cap is way too high - old L1s, leftover farms, mid-cap tokens, “still listed” coins with a last CEX print and no book.
That layer works like this:
1. Coin last trades at $0.12 on a thin pair.
2. Site multiplies by 400 million circulating.
3. Screen says $48 million market cap.
4. Real bid might be $50k–$500k. The other $47.5 million is a spreadsheet. Continued …