Actually, it's a bit exaggerated to say that the crypto industry is at a critical moment of survival. Indeed, as the author mentioned, the ETF we had hoped for has been approved, DeFi has been adopted by mainstream institutions, MEME has broken through, and stablecoins are still growing in scale. Macroscopically, there are signs of prosperity and flourishing, but in the real market, people are enduring the piercing cold winter. Why？ 1) The fat protocol theory is no longer valid. In the past, we believed in the fat protocol theory, believing that the underlying Layer1 public chain would capture the maximum value. However, it has been proven that the upper layers of public chains such as Layer2 and Layer3 are still playing the game of Daxing Infrastructure, and the actual flow generated by the application side is simply not enough to be fed back to the underlying protocol through tokenomics. In other words, the business has been successful, but the value has not been deposited on the token; 2) ETFs bring institutional funds and also cut off the logic of fund rotation. The approval of ETFs has turned assets such as BTC and ETH into closed assets in Wall Street institutional allocation, which prevents them from overflowing into DeFi, altcoins and other markets to form sector rotation as before. The original linkage logic of BTC eating meat and shanzhai drinking soup seems to have been cut off, resulting in mainstream assets such as BTC becoming more successful, while the native Crypto shanzhai market has become more desolate; 3) DeFi and MEME are caught in a binary opposition and internal competition. The adoption of DeFi by institutions and the continued implementation of RWA narratives are all good things, but relying on traditional financial on chain mapping cannot bring sustained vitality to the Crypto native industry. However, the popularity of MEME has always been just a stock game, and the cutthroat situation of PVP has not only failed to solve the lack of incremental applications, but has also pushed the industry into a narrow casino corner. At the end of the day, I don't think it's because the crypto industry is not doing well, but rather that the wild growth period of "retail investors getting rich without thinking" and "grassroots teams starting low threshold businesses" in the past has completely passed.