In the era of token boom, why do new opportunities keep emerging?

Amid the meme coin craze, the crypto community has begun a new round of discussion: token issuance thresholds have been lowered to zero, thousands of new coins emerge daily, so what new opportunities are there in the market? Is it still worth participating?

Such questions are actually nothing new. Looking back at history, each cycle has had people claiming “no more cryptocurrencies after Bitcoin,” “no more public chains after Ethereum,” “no more meme coins after certain tokens.” The underlying implication is: the opportunities have ended, and the game should end.

But reality always proves otherwise.

What is truly scarce has never been the coins themselves

The 2017 wave of coin issuance was essentially driven by a supply shortage combined with abundant hot money, creating opportunities out of this imbalance. After a series of optimizations—such as ERC-20 standardization, inscriptions craze, zero-threshold token platforms—the supply of tokens exploded from limited editions to a flood. Logically, the market should have been saturated by then.

But what happened? As soon as the meme coin concept appeared, it triggered a new wave of frenzy. Why?

Because what is scarce is never the number of coins, but the opportunity to make money itself.

The hot money in the market is fundamentally chasing not a specific token, but that kind of “scarcest of all: the暴利机会” (lucrative opportunity). Even if coins become worthless, as long as someone can design a new narrative framework or a new way to participate, hot money can be attracted once again.

Endless cycles

Since 2024, from the meme explosion in the Solana ecosystem to inscriptions craze on various new public chains, and to the speculative waves across Layer2 solutions, each new hot trend has been packaged as the “last chance to get rich.”

This is not coincidence, but an inevitable market pattern.

As long as hot money exists, someone will always design new game rules, create new stories, and foster new “scarcity.” From this perspective, increasing the number of tokens is actually meaningless—because traders are not chasing the scarcity of coins, but the scarcity of profit opportunities.

And profit opportunities are almost eternally scarce. Only a few can always make money in the market, while most participants will end up losing. This zero-sum, wave-and-recede wealth transfer is bound to continuously attract new participants.

Who truly profits

Here’s a harsh reality: in this endless cycle, those who make big money are never the trend-following hot money, but the ones who:

• Control the platforms and channels (exchanges)
• Set up schemes and craft dreams (market makers and project teams)
• Hold informational advantages and pricing power (institutions)

They are the true “millstone masters.” They design the game rules, control the narrative, and always profit from each new round of the game.

In contrast, retail investors and hot money chasing new trends are more like participants driven by an eternal desire—dreaming of getting rich in the next wave, often ending with total losses.

History has no end, and never will

So, when someone asks, “Is there no more opportunity?” from the perspective of market microstructure, new opportunities will always emerge. But the essence of these “opportunities” is an eternal game of setting traps and catching suckers.

The number of tokens will increase, concepts will become more novel, stories will become more outrageous. Hot money will continue to chase, platforms will keep bleeding, and market makers will keep dreaming.

This game has no end. Only participants will eventually realize—true scarcity has always been the ability to make money itself. And those things packaged as scarce opportunities are often just a guise for wealth transfer.