Bear Market and Noise Bulls

Written by: Haotian

After talking to several builders, I was surprised to find: they aren't dreading the arrival of a bear market—in fact, they hope the "deep bear" lasts longer. Why? Let me try to unpack their mindset:

1) From the 2023 inscription "pseudo-innovation" craze, to the unconvincing BTC Layer2 narrative driven by Eastern and Western VCs who refuse to back each other's projects, to Solana's wave of AI Agent MEME asset issuance stories, and then Binance's series of artificial internal-market bull runs—the entire bull cycle has fragmented into short bursts of attention: noisy, fleeting, and ultimately leaving behind chaos.

You could say a real bull market never arrived, or that fake bulls never left—but one thing is clear: the kind of "super bull" we once knew—like DeFi Summer or NFTs breaking into the mainstream—that drives on-chain innovation and brings in off-chain users—now feels unreachable.

2) What frustrates builders most is that once the narrative of the MEME Super Cycle took over, MEME culture evolved into a "narrative black hole," voraciously consuming all market attention that might otherwise go to technological innovation.

Imagine: PumpFun spawns tens of thousands of meme coins every day, and a single meme project can easily reach a $100M or even $2B market cap. Everyone gets hooked on the zero-sum thrill of PVP gaming, with zero patience left to understand what a decentralized sequencer is, or intent-based execution networks, or ZK coprocessors. This leaves long-term builders feeling completely invisible.

3) Even worse, due to short liquidity windows for exits, serious building projects are delayed by their own roadmap and tokenomics design, while VC-backed narrative-driven projects or exchange-native ecosystem schemes do everything possible to siphon away the liquidity meant for value-driven projects.

By the time genuine narrative projects finally deliver a product, market liquidity has dried up. Their TGE immediately dumps, forcing them into desperate measures—market manipulation, insider trading, bad-faith token distribution—exiting disgracefully under public scorn. Remember: without sufficient liquidity and favorable conditions, the odds of successfully pumping a project are one in ten thousand.

4) The crux is, real technological innovation requires long cycles to validate, to achieve product-market fit. But today’s market environment is simply not conducive to innovation. A harsh reality: a project typically needs at least 2–3 years—from technical development to product refinement to ecosystem integration—or even multiple cycles, to build real brand moat. Yet in today’s climate, within just a 3-month window, everyone races to inflate TVL, chase hype, rush to TGE. Who still has the patience to wait for slow PMF validation?

Thus, the market falls into a tragic loop: true innovation needs time, but the market won’t give it; long-term builders get eliminated, while opportunists cash out.

That’s it.

Now I finally understand: what they truly wish for isn't just a powerless "deep bear," but the complete removal of those "noise bulls" that block real innovation.