In 2025, when Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana have strongly broken through the boundaries of narrative, many investors thought that the "full bull market" had arrived. However, reality has repeatedly slapped their faces: except for a few star assets, the prices of most altcoins are still trading at low levels, on-chain activities are lackluster, financing is stagnant, and the community is silent. Jason, an analyst at StarEx Exchange, believes that this is not a simple "compensatory lag", but a deeper structural phenomenon. The key to understanding this phenomenon lies in three core changes: the shift in capital logic, the collapse of narrative structure, and the lack of ecological vitality.
1. Funding logic has undergone a fundamental change: from "wide net" to "concentrated betting"
The last round of bull market (2020-2021) was a stage dominated by retail funds. At that time, new concepts such as DeFi and NFT were constantly emerging, and project parties quickly attracted attention through community incentives, airdrops, liquidity mining, etc. Retail investors blindly chased the rise based on the logic of "narrative is value", forming a strong FOMO effect. Under that market structure, the myth of "getting rich with one coin" is frequently staged, and even tokens whose white papers have not yet been launched can be valued dozens of times by hype.
However, by 2025, the dominant forces in the market have changed fundamentally. The main funds entering the new bull market cycle are not speculative retail investors, but institutions: the inflow of Bitcoin spot ETFs has driven the large-scale entry of compliant funds such as family offices, pensions, and sovereign funds; Ethereum's "financial infrastructure" narrative has been widely recognized by asset management companies; Solana's high-speed composable ecology has attracted accelerated deployment of American venture capital forces.
The investment logic of these funds is more prudent: they will no longer blindly bet on projects that lack substantive business models, revenue models, and data indicators of user growth. What they care about is: Does the project generate real income? Does the token have a stable value capture mechanism, such as destruction, staking returns, etc.? Does the project have a "network effect" or path dependence? Is there a compliant structure and a clear governance system?
In other words, this round of bull market is a bull market driven by high-quality assets. Funds are no longer flooded, but are precisely drip-fed, flowing only to protocols with "clear logic, real use, and good governance structure". This leads to an obvious "Matthew effect" in market liquidity: the strong become stronger, and the weak are completely marginalized.
2. The pace of narrative updates is extremely fast, and most projects cannot keep up with the times
The value capture of the crypto market is inseparable from narrative drive. In the past cycles, DeFi Summer, NFT Summer, Layer 1 War, Web3 games, etc. have become the protagonists in turn. Each round of bull market is not only a rise in prices, but also a reconstruction of collective imagination. But the market structure in 2025 is more complicated: hot narratives are updated faster, capital continues to focus on a very small number of emerging sectors, and old projects are gradually marginalized. The main narrative lines for 2025 include: stablecoin legislation promotes the global expansion of US dollar stablecoins, and Ethereum is revalued as the underlying clearing and settlement layer; Solana realizes the closed loop of on-chain users through DePIN, payment, and Memecoin ecology; the scenario of combining RWA with on-chain finance is gradually implemented, attracting traditional financial participation; AI and on-chain data are integrated to promote the rise of a new generation of data markets; Chain Abstraction and L2 ecology merge to promote modular architecture upgrades.
StarEx exchange analyst Jason believes that these narratives have the triple support of realistic policy support, user demand and technological progress. In sharp contrast, most altcoin projects are still immersed in the logic of 2021 - replica DeFi protocols, NFT projects with no product updates, L1 chains lacking business models, skinned Move projects, and Memecoin that returns to zero as soon as it goes online.
What's more serious is that some old narratives have been completely eliminated by the market. For example, the valuation logic of the "ETH killer" L1 public chain collapsed, and the market no longer pays for performance; the "Web3 game" craze has cooled down, and most projects lack user retention and payment capabilities; the DAO governance bubble has burst, and the ideal of decentralized collaboration has not been effectively implemented; "edge infrastructure" projects lack actual usage scenarios and are gradually marginalized.
In this context, projects that cannot quickly respond to narratives and reconstruct their own value propositions will inevitably be forgotten by the market, no matter how good the technology is or how large the community is.
3. Long-term sluggishness of on-chain ecological activity: loss of users, developers and capital
StarEx exchange analyst Jason believes that whether a chain has real growth momentum will ultimately return to the three elements of ecological vitality: users, developers, and funds. From multiple indicators, it can be seen that more than 80% of the altcoin public chains or protocols currently have low on-chain data: TVL has not recovered, developers continue to lose, and there is a lack of new user growth. Although many old projects are still "maintaining operations", they have long lost their growth momentum.
In sharp contrast are those projects that are truly entering a bull market - their data is real growth.
Under this ecological comparison, the "bear market state" of most projects is not a temporary lag in capital rotation, but the failure of their own ecology to complete self-upgrade, user retention and technological evolution in the long winter of 2022-2024, resulting in the current structural dilemma of "no rise".
StarEx exchange analyst Jason believes that the current round of bull market is a structural market dominated by a few assets and high-quality projects. The altcoins without financial support, narrative promotion and ecological vitality will continue to stand still in the "pseudo bull market". The future market will be more cruel, and the 28 split will evolve into a 91 split, or even a 99 split.
