Written by: hitesh.eth

Translated by: AididiaoJP, Foresight News

If you are still waiting for altcoin season, then you have already lost.

It has been almost three years since Bitcoin last bottomed out between $15,000 and $20,000. In the cryptocurrency space, three years is a long time. During these three years, those who have held onto positions from the last cycle are still in a state of loss, many of whom have been mentally destroyed. Many tokens have never recovered; narratives have faded; hype has died down; liquidity has dried up.

Most portfolios remain graveyards of dreams. Only a few tokens like Solana and BNB have brought real wealth effects. Ethereum has made some moves, but not enough to save those who entered late. Tokens that were once popular in the last cycle, such as DOT and MATIC, are still declining. Game tokens have essentially been declared dead. Those who believed in the metaverse and gaming narratives have watched their funds devalue month after month. Yet they still hold on and pray, as if religious faith could save them, but it won’t.

In the past three years, there have been only two real paths. The first group consists of those "holders" who are stuck in time, baselessly believing that the market will someday rebound and their tokens will magically return to previous all-time highs. They have not reallocated their positions, they have not evolved, and they have not researched new narratives. They have not built any on-chain skills, merely holding onto the same useless positions, waiting for a miracle to happen. Worst of all, many of them have left their tokens on centralized exchanges. And when exchanges like WazirX are hacked or withdrawals are frozen, these people cry on Twitter. But they still haven’t learned anything. Their entire strategy is hope. Hope is not a strategy; in the cryptocurrency space, hope is a slow financial suicide.

The other path belongs to a new generation that entered the market in the past two to three years. They came in with no loyalty to old narratives and did not care about 2020 portfolios. They came here for one thing: to extract profits from the market. These people entered through two doors: airdrop hunting and meme coin trading. They turned to on-chain early. Some of them started from scratch, building capital from nothing. Most ended up breaking even because they did not understand exit strategies, but at least they were participating in real games. Unlike the timid bystanders who never left centralized exchanges.

In the past three years, we have witnessed a series of narratives: Meme season, AI season, Meme AI season, two Meme cycles, two AI cycles, a small DeFi cycle, a buyback and burn cycle, a continuous privacy cycle, ICM meta cycle, AI agent cycle. Narratives have become shorter and sharper, burning brightly for two weeks before fading away. The lazy complain of manipulation, while the smart rotate and survive. This is not a market for believers; it is a market for survivors.

Now everything is fragmented, and the market is no longer a unified community. It is "the trenches," where people have chosen sides. Solana trench, BNB trench, Base trench, Meme trench, AI trench, DeFi trench, ICM trench. Each trench has different movements, each trench has its own insiders, leaders, information flows, and liquidity cycles. Those inside the trenches know where the funds are flowing; they understand a simple fact: there will never be another unified altcoin season because liquidity has been dispersed across various narratives, cross-chain bridges, public chains, and cultures. If you are not inside the trenches, you will never see altcoin season again. You will only see red candlesticks and frustration.

Retail investors sitting outside the trenches are still waiting for some macro switch to be triggered that will push their stagnant positions to new highs. These people log into exchanges daily, staring at charts like addicts. They shout "I've had enough" every week, only to repeat the same cycle. They are the most self-deceiving people in the entire industry. They still post charts of LINK to $1,000 or DOT to $200. They still believe that one day liquidity will rotate back to them out of goodwill. They do not realize that this market has no mercy and no memory. It does not care who has waited the longest; it only rewards those who adapt the fastest.

Altcoin season has already happened; it just didn’t happen for you. It occurred in fragmented forms, in meme coins on the Base chain; it happened in the rotations of Solana; it occurred in the Ponzi economics of airdrops; it happened among early AI frontrunners; it happened in the burning of meta tokens. It happened in high-speed rotations while you were fixated on charts of altcoins that died back in 2021. That was your choice; the market moved forward while you stagnated.

You focus on technical analysis influencers who have never made real money. You use 50x leverage on tokens you don’t understand, you get liquidated, you add margin, and you get liquidated again. You call it bad luck. No. This is not bad luck; this is a lack of skill. Nothing will change unless you accept the truth. You are losing not because you are unlucky; you are losing because you refuse to learn.

People reject new opportunities because they are addicted to bias. When something new appears, they call it a scam before even reading about it. They see a new meta and ask when the airdrop is without looking at the documentation. They see smart people rotating and mock them. Then when those people post six-figure profits, they cry again. You can call it insider trading if that makes you feel better. But the truth is simpler: you are not defeated; you are outperformed.

Look at Zcash; it is one of the clearest trades of this cycle. A strong narrative; strong support; organic promotion, with Naval publicly discussing it when it was around $80. Whether you like Naval or not, this signal is undeniable. When a respected voice aligns with a strong narrative, and a fervent leader like Mert pushes it daily, that is not noise. That is a clear, builder-supported momentum play. But most people missed it because they compared it to Monero without understanding any of the technical or adoption nuances. They did not research, they did not read, and they were too lazy to do so. They dismissed it without a second thought because not doing research is more comfortable than admitting their laziness.

You cannot expect to have faith without putting in effort. If you are unwilling to learn, you do not deserve to reap rewards. Most people are too weak to commit; they constantly test small trades, rotating without arguments, jumping from one influencer to another like lost sheep. And when real momentum arrives, they panic buy at the top, then sit holding their positions, hoping for 100x because some clown tweeted. This is not a strategy; this is financial suicide disguised as ambition.

The market will always shout huge targets; it doesn’t matter. The market shouts numbers to attract liquidity; the greed bait is the oldest trick in the game. If you are not mature enough to build your own exit plan, you will give back everything you earned. This is certain; there are no rules, and you will always be destroyed by greed.

It ultimately comes down to this: if you cannot protect your gains, you will lose everything. The market does not take money from the weak; the weak willingly give it up. Market makers do not steal money from you; they are just waiting for you to self-destruct. Retail users once owned Bitcoin. Now it is owned by institutions. Retail users once had faith; now retail users only have memes, self-soothing, and screenshots of profits they no longer hold.

This game is not about who is the smartest; it is about who is evolving. If you do not learn, you are dying. If you do not rotate, you are declining. If you do not learn on-chain knowledge, you are irrelevant. You do not need to be special; you do not need insider channels, but you do need to put in the effort. You need to read, you need to track narratives, and you need to learn how to exit. You need to control your emotions; you need to act when action is required.

Cryptocurrency is not hard; people make it difficult because they chase dopamine instead of discipline. They are so eager for shortcuts that they never build skills. That is why in a market that creates wealth in every cycle, most people will remain poor.

Those who succeed are not the chosen ones; they are not lucky; they are not inherently different. They simply show up every day and learn while others scroll. They build systems while others chase noise. They act early while others argue. They exit cleanly while others beg for another pump. They survive in every cycle because they adapt in every cycle.

If you are still waiting for altcoin season, you have already lost. The game has moved on; evolve or be eliminated. No one will come to save you; a new bull market will not magically correct bad habits. There is now only one rule: learn, or be left behind.

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