Do you also have this feeling — this year's blockchain market is like a hibernating beast, with each track looking sluggish? Let's take a look at what has really happened.

**NFT Market's Free Fall**

BAYC, once a "status symbol," has encountered a Waterloo. The floor price plummeted from over 400 ETH to 0.08 ETH, with less than 10 transactions in the secondary market in a single day. The entire NFT sector seems to have been accelerated from hot to cold, dropping straight into the cold palace. Sometimes, looking at transaction records, you might not see a few real deals in a week.

**Death Spiral of Altcoins and Meme Coins**

PEPE has fallen 99.97% from its all-time high, with daily trading volume only in the tens of thousands of dollars. SHIB, once a "dog coin," has been completely forgotten by the market; the enthusiasm for its burn mechanism has long since vanished. As for WIF, BONK, POPCAT, and other emerging projects, stories of their market cap shrinking from hundreds of millions to below tens of millions are played out daily. Buyers and sellers form a strange equilibrium — neither side wants to move.

**Collective Cold Start of Layer 2 Networks**

Arbitrum's TVL has dropped from a peak of $50 billion to below $3 billion, with daily active addresses less than one-tenth of the bull market period. The price of Optimism's OP token has been a roller coaster, halved along the way. Incentive programs from early stages are now almost unclaimed, and ecosystem development has fallen into awkward stagnation. Base was once hyped as the "social chain ceiling," but transaction volume has dropped from millions to tens of thousands, and liquidity on on-chain DeFi protocols is drying up severely, making fee income barely enough to sustain basic services.

**The Reality of Layer 1 Blockchains**

Ethereum's gas fees are like bargain prices — hovering around 1 to 2 gwei for years, with real activity on the chain being scarce. The blob fees introduced after the Dencun upgrade are ridiculously cheap, which ironically indicates weak transaction demand. Solana's "downtime issues" have indeed decreased, but this is not a sign of technological progress; rather, no one is trading on it anymore. TPS has fallen from thousands during the bull market to a few hundred, and daily trading volume on DEXs like Raydium and Jupiter is so bleak it’s hard to watch. As for those public chains claiming to "surpass Ethereum" or "beat Solana," after launch, aside from price plunges, they haven't built any real ecosystem.

**Bitcoin Ecosystem's Warmth Fading**

The Ordinals inscription craze has subsided, with transaction fee income plunging 80%, and many miners choosing to shut down to cut losses. When Runes protocol launched, it was hailed as the "new era of Bitcoin memes," but now its daily trading volume is nearly zero. This stark contrast from frenzy to silence has caught all participants off guard.

**Community Silence**

Remember those WeChat groups that flooded every day? Now, not a meaningful message appears in a week. Well-known channels on Telegram like Crypto Moon Calls and Alpha Group have seen their online users drop from tens of thousands to just a few hundred, with administrators leaving the groups. Occasionally, newcomers ask "Is it still alive?" but hardly anyone responds. Major community servers on Discord are more like ghost towns — official servers for big projects like Azuki, Doodles, CloneX have either been set to read-only or shut down altogether. Those large communities that had 100,000 members during the bull market now have only single-digit active users.

**Collective Disappearance of Crypto Celebrities**

Figures like Ansem and GCR, once meme culture promoters, haven't posted on-chain content for half a year. Some have shifted to stock discussions, others have started focusing on AI tracks. Many OG influencers have either deactivated their accounts or switched to training courses, and even new project promotions have stopped. This collective silence perhaps speaks more about the market's decline than the market itself.