2025-12-31 08:20:56

Looking back at the 2021 market cycle, it was essentially a classic pump-and-dump script: controlling the market→driving prices up→retail investors following suit and buying spot→cashing out and fleeing. Now, the situation has reversed—retail investors have all moved to trading derivatives.

This change has altered everything. Derivative trading is fundamentally a zero-sum game; every loss incurred by retail traders directly benefits exchanges and market makers, contributing nothing to the spot market. Meanwhile, project teams hold large amounts of tokens but have nowhere to deploy them. With no buyers in the spot market, they can only keep selling to maintain liquidity.

This creates a vicious cycle: project teams dump tokens→price plunges→retail investors become even more hesitant to buy spot→they rush into derivatives to gamble on a rebound. The final outcome is that the spot market is completely drained, leaving only selling pressure and no buyers.

Even more interestingly, market makers have also figured out this logic. Since it's difficult to manipulate the spot market, why bother trying to pump prices and distribute tokens? Instead, they directly short BTC in the derivatives market—this is the most efficient way to harvest. This structural shift has completely destroyed the hype space for altcoins—without retail investors to buy the spot, the market has become merely a channel for selling.

BTC0.87%

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airdrop_huntress

· 5h ago

Exactly right, retail investors have been countered this time. In the past, they could turn things around by following the trend and buying spot assets, but now they are all in contracts, desperately trying to buy the dip, resulting in heavy losses and working for the exchanges. When there's no demand for the project in the spot market, the project team has to dump tokens, and the more aggressively they do so, the more retail investors panic. Then they go back to contracts to leverage and gamble on a rebound. This cycle is truly relentless.

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ImpermanentPhobia

· 5h ago

Wow, that's too straightforward... Right now, it's definitely the exchange cutting the leeks, and retail investors are still foolishly deleveraging.

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fren.eth

· 5h ago

Forget it, playing with contracts now is just working for the exchange. There's no one to rescue us if we're the last to hold the bag.

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0xLostKey

· 5h ago

Retail traders playing contracts are really just giving their money directly to the exchange. Who's to blame if no one wants spot anymore? Market makers are now too lazy to pump the price; shorting directly is more profitable. This logic makes sense. That wave in 2021 was truly a harvest, and now it's reversed—no one can escape. Contracts are a zero-sum game; it sounds simple, but in reality, it's a cycle of losing money. Everyone says spot is losing blood, but altcoins are really out of options—it's all selling pressure. What sounds like liquidity is, in fact, project teams dumping their own coins. Retail investors should have seen through this trick long ago, but they still rush in to gamble on rebounds. This time, the market makers are really smart—they're harvesting directly in the futures market without much effort. No one is taking the spot, so the coin price can only keep falling.

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BlockchainDecoder

· 5h ago

According to research, this view indeed captures the key shift in the market microstructure. From a technical perspective, the zero-sum nature of the derivatives market leads to fundamental biases in capital flow—notably, this phenomenon is supported by data in multiple research reports after 2021. However, it must be said that the judgment that all retail investors have exited contracts is a bit absolute; data shows that although the spot side has lost some blood, it has not completely disappeared. More interestingly, this logic has also become a new arbitrage opportunity—smart money has long been exploiting this contradiction.

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