Preface
When BTC reaches a historical high and ETH rises by over 40% in a month, the crypto market reignites "bull market expectations". On-chain fund activity is rebounding, exchange heat is clearly rising, and macro signals are showing favorable trends.
But when you open your wallet, you find that Altcoins are still stagnant - is this the bull market you're familiar with?
I. Have Altcoins Really Missed the Bull Market?
[The rest of the translation follows the same professional approach, maintaining the original structure and translating all text while preserving technical terms and proper nouns as specified in the initial instructions.] Would you like me to continue with the full translation?Especially in some "hot projects" of the Solana ecosystem recently, KOLs frequently participate in the "airdrop farming + group transfer attention" strategy, which increases the probability of losses for ordinary users.
In the long term, this behavior is accelerating the destruction of Altcoin's trust foundation.
3. Sector Heat Transfer: Narrative Can't Compete with BTCFi, AI, reStaking
CoinGecko's report points out that the current crypto narrative is concentrated in the following three tracks:
Traditional Altcoin projects lack connection with mainstream narrative, have thin narratives, no technical breakthroughs, and scarce ecosystem cooperation, making it difficult to attract new traffic attention.
The hot spot is no longer "all coins can rise", but capital and users concentrating on "investing in the right story".
4. Market Trust and Liquidity Structure Being Rewritten
The trust mechanism of Altcoins is collapsing:
Users no longer trust project teams: Most projects are only active in the first 30 days after launch, followed by liquidity exhaustion.
Market makers' interest is declining: MM strategy institutions are concentrating resources on BTC, ETH, and compliant stable coins, with Altcoin trading pairs being delisted by multiple exchanges.
A more serious problem is that the lack of consensus leads to community "hollowing out": project teams are left with only operational accounts, without real communities; retail investors are flowing to point systems, airdrop hunter channels, and even AI computing power gaming.
This also leads to a new phenomenon - Altcoins are no longer about "greater fool theory", but "being quick": no one believes in the long-term, everyone is rushing for short-term liquidity.
Altcoins are not rising not because no one is paying attention, but because there's no reason to believe in them anymore.
When the project team's incentive design is no longer sustainable, KOLs' reputation cannot be established, and users' game is reduced to a "front-running mechanism", the entire Altcoin ecosystem loses its basic trust and liquidity absorption structure.
The next step is to redesign this system, rather than repeat old routines.
IV. New "Altcoin Gameplay" Rises
1. Exchange-Driven Airdrops and Point Mechanisms
Against the background of declining user enthusiasm, some exchanges have emerged by designing task systems, point exchange, and airdrop activities to reignite user participation. Additionally, some projects have begun to introduce point multiplier mechanisms to encourage long-term user participation and enhance community activity. The core of these mechanisms is:
Lower participation barriers: Rewards can be obtained through simple tasks, attracting more users to participate.
Enhance user stickiness: Point and airdrop mechanisms encourage users to continuously participate in project ecosystems.
Expand community influence: Recommendation mechanisms prompt users to actively spread project information, expanding influence.
2. Peak at Launch? MEME Coin's Sustainability Questioned
MEME coins in 2025 show stronger community-driven characteristics. Project teams quickly gather popularity through social media, community activities, and viral content. Before listing on exchanges, they usually quickly attract market attention through social media spread; after the trading pair is listed, the price quickly rises and then rapidly adjusts. Its sustainability is questioned, and the market is calling for project teams to continuously optimize in terms of safety, governance structure, and community building.
V. Future Outlook: Altcoin's Breakthrough Path
1. Altcoins Need Skin Change vs Soul Change: Repackaging Old Projects or Reconstructing Mechanisms?
Whether Altcoins have a chance does not depend on market conditions, but on whether they can "self-update".
In the past, many projects disappeared during bear markets and "resurrected" by changing skin in the early bull market: changing the logo, updating a roadmap, adding some AI keywords, and then starting to tell stories again. But 2025 users no longer easily believe in "old wine in new bottles".
Compared to "skin change", truly competitive projects chose "soul change": reconstructing Token economic models, introducing fairer airdrop mechanisms, and even guiding community co-governance through DAO, transforming users from speculators to ecosystem co-builders, while achieving continuous activity and liquidity through extremely concise user experience and deep binding with on-chain native traffic.
The key to breakthrough is not how trendy the packaging is, but how new the mechanism is, how genuine the emotion is, and how stable the rhythm is.
2. What Do Retail Investors Really Need? Narrative? Utility? Or Pure Speculation?
In 2021, retail investors chased narratives and imagination space.
In 2025, retail investors are more concerned about "can I try at low cost", "can I sell at any time", "am I being treated as a counterparty by project teams or KOLs"?
They don't need "grand visions", but clear expectation management and quick feedback.
This means project teams must redesign user participation paths:
Task, point, and NFT binding mechanisms cannot just play "incentives", but must incorporate "exit costs" into the design;
No longer pursue explosive user numbers, but establish a small and refined "core loyalty pool";
Let users feel they are "participating" rather than "being designed".
3. How Can Project Teams, Platforms, and Communities Rebuild User Trust?
The current market has two growth engines:
Exchange/platform-driven traffic system: Exchanges are reconstructing a one-stop user traffic introduction path of "tasks → incentives → airdrops → listing". This is not only a cold start tool for projects but also a "sandbox" to control traffic risks.
Community-driven new narrative system: Telegram fission, creator DAO, and low-barrier KOL incubation tools (such as Zealy, Galxe) have become infrastructure for Altcoin traffic autonomy.
If the previous traffic strategy was "overwhelming", the current strategy is more like "igniting sparks": letting early believers play, earn money, generate real transactions and content, to possibly achieve fission and natural spread.
Summary: Altcoins Have Reached a Reshuffling Point
Altcoins have not disappeared; they have just reached a reshuffling threshold.
Those projects without mechanism innovation, lacking community participation, and fantasizing about shilling to rise 10 times are destined to sink in this cycle.
But projects that truly understand user behavior changes, reconstruct incentive structures, and can coexist and win-win with communities still have the possibility of breaking through in a "local bull market".
This bull market does not belong to all Altcoins, but to those players who do serious work.
It's not about "who has the loudest voice wins", but "who can stabilize people's hearts will live longer".
