Author: jawor Compiled by AididiaoJP, Foresight News When people are overwhelmed with choices, they actually have fewer. In one famous study, a table of 24 jams attracted a large crowd, but few bought anything. What happened when the choices were reduced to six? Sales skyrocketed. A complex paradox. Now apply this paradox to cryptocurrency. We have over 20,000 listed tokens, and if you count all the experiments, failed projects, memes, and abandoned sidechains, the total could reach 50 million. This is insane. The casino is not only open, but infinite. Infinite tables, infinite tokens, and infinite meta-consumption. The result? No one knows what to bet on. Retail investors stand no chance. The wallet user experience is a minefield. You bridge across chains, pay fees, forget to revoke authorization, and are left with ten dead tokens. Most new users leave within 90 days. It's brutal, but not surprising. We make this intentionally difficult, not to protect value, but to chase it. The deeper problem is that cryptocurrency no longer feels genuine. We talk about decentralization and financial freedom, but every week brings a new Trumpcoin, a new insider pump, another "influencer-led" exit. All this happens while liquidity fragments, narratives cannibalize, and attention spans grow increasingly thin. This is not the market maturing, but disorderly entropy increase. Liquidity is a joke now Even if capital flows in, it no longer drives the market like it used to. Why? Because funds are spread across thousands of tokens. Everyone wants an "altcoin season," but there's no room left. Trying to blow up 1,000 balloons with one breath is simply impossible. Take Axiom, for example, which has amazing technology but instead of creating new liquidity, it simply siphons user capital away without injecting it back into the market. Or look at all those OTC trades that dilute supply but don’t show up on the books until insiders decide to sell. We are building a liquidity black hole, not a flywheel. When the pool is being drained faster than it is being filled, you get not just price stagnation, but market manipulation. Manipulation has become cheap. Time-weighted average price (TWP) gaming, oracle exploits, and fake trading volume are all easy. Governance has become a joke. Voter turnout has plummeted, whales have seized everything, and Sybil attackers have farmed with 30 wallets unnoticed. This is not just a problem for users, builders feel it too. Teams burn millions of dollars launching the "next layer 1 network" without product-market fit. Projects chase the same original concept with slight variations. Composability is broken because everyone optimizes for token value rather than protocol stability. Mutable infrastructure stifles innovation. The fundamental DeFi building blocks used to be immutable, something other builders could rely on. Now most protocols are upgradeable, prioritizing short-term revenue over reliability. This had a knock-on effect: Builders cannot build on the infrastructure securely Liquidity becomes isolated Protocols become isolated fiefdoms We broke the money Lego set and now we’re playing with loose bricks. This is unsustainable Most of these tokens shouldn't exist. But in crypto, permissionless = inevitable. Anyone can launch anything. You can't stop it. But perhaps we can shape the environment. Centralized exchanges still act like value-neutral platforms. They delist tokens when trading volume dries up, not when teams disappear or ecosystems decay. This needs to change. Initiatives like @blockworksres's Token Transparency Framework are a start, but imagine if there were multiple token rating agencies, and their average scores could influence centralized exchanges' listing/delisting decisions. This isn’t censorship, this is curation, and it’s desperately needed. Venture capital money is drying up, and mid-tier projects can no longer easily secure funding rounds. The second quarter of 2025 saw record M&A volume. Coinbase acquired Deribit and Echo. Stripe acquired Bridge. We're talking about billion-dollar deals. Why? Because the space has too many moving parts and too little utility. That's not noise, that's integration. Too many projects chasing the same idea? They get merged. Too many tokens dilute the narrative? They get eliminated. Too many chains are unattractive? They go bankrupt. Less noise, more signal. Let's build something we can believe in Crypto needs belief again, not memes, not hope, not another locked token presale with a $300 million fully diluted valuation. Faith doesn't come from more, it comes from clarity, from a smaller surface area of what actually works. From agreements that care more about the product than the pump and dump. But we can build filters instead of firewalls. We can: Require greater transparency from token issuers Push exchanges to delist tokens based on integrity rather than revenue Creating incentives for protocols to become composable again Reward builders who ship real products, not just narratives Preferring fewer, higher-certainty bets over endless “repeating” The future isn’t about launching the next altcoin casino, it’s about creating systems that people can trust and stay with for longer than 90 days. The bull market will come again, it always does. But next time, let’s not waste it on another 30 million tokens that no one needs.Author: jawor Compiled by AididiaoJP, Foresight News When people are overwhelmed with choices, they actually have fewer. In one famous study, a table of 24 jams attracted a large crowd, but few bought anything. What happened when the choices were reduced to six? Sales skyrocketed. A complex paradox. Now apply this paradox to cryptocurrency. We have over 20,000 listed tokens, and if you count all the experiments, failed projects, memes, and abandoned sidechains, the total could reach 50 million. This is insane. The casino is not only open, but infinite. Infinite tables, infinite tokens, and infinite meta-consumption. The result? No one knows what to bet on. Retail investors stand no chance. The wallet user experience is a minefield. You bridge across chains, pay fees, forget to revoke authorization, and are left with ten dead tokens. Most new users leave within 90 days. It's brutal, but not surprising. We make this intentionally difficult, not to protect value, but to chase it. The deeper problem is that cryptocurrency no longer feels genuine. We talk about decentralization and financial freedom, but every week brings a new Trumpcoin, a new insider pump, another "influencer-led" exit. All this happens while liquidity fragments, narratives cannibalize, and attention spans grow increasingly thin. This is not the market maturing, but disorderly entropy increase. Liquidity is a joke now Even if capital flows in, it no longer drives the market like it used to. Why? Because funds are spread across thousands of tokens. Everyone wants an "altcoin season," but there's no room left. Trying to blow up 1,000 balloons with one breath is simply impossible. Take Axiom, for example, which has amazing technology but instead of creating new liquidity, it simply siphons user capital away without injecting it back into the market. Or look at all those OTC trades that dilute supply but don’t show up on the books until insiders decide to sell. We are building a liquidity black hole, not a flywheel. When the pool is being drained faster than it is being filled, you get not just price stagnation, but market manipulation. Manipulation has become cheap. Time-weighted average price (TWP) gaming, oracle exploits, and fake trading volume are all easy. Governance has become a joke. Voter turnout has plummeted, whales have seized everything, and Sybil attackers have farmed with 30 wallets unnoticed. This is not just a problem for users, builders feel it too. Teams burn millions of dollars launching the "next layer 1 network" without product-market fit. Projects chase the same original concept with slight variations. Composability is broken because everyone optimizes for token value rather than protocol stability. Mutable infrastructure stifles innovation. The fundamental DeFi building blocks used to be immutable, something other builders could rely on. Now most protocols are upgradeable, prioritizing short-term revenue over reliability. This had a knock-on effect: Builders cannot build on the infrastructure securely Liquidity becomes isolated Protocols become isolated fiefdoms We broke the money Lego set and now we’re playing with loose bricks. This is unsustainable Most of these tokens shouldn't exist. But in crypto, permissionless = inevitable. Anyone can launch anything. You can't stop it. But perhaps we can shape the environment. Centralized exchanges still act like value-neutral platforms. They delist tokens when trading volume dries up, not when teams disappear or ecosystems decay. This needs to change. Initiatives like @blockworksres's Token Transparency Framework are a start, but imagine if there were multiple token rating agencies, and their average scores could influence centralized exchanges' listing/delisting decisions. This isn’t censorship, this is curation, and it’s desperately needed. Venture capital money is drying up, and mid-tier projects can no longer easily secure funding rounds. The second quarter of 2025 saw record M&A volume. Coinbase acquired Deribit and Echo. Stripe acquired Bridge. We're talking about billion-dollar deals. Why? Because the space has too many moving parts and too little utility. That's not noise, that's integration. Too many projects chasing the same idea? They get merged. Too many tokens dilute the narrative? They get eliminated. Too many chains are unattractive? They go bankrupt. Less noise, more signal. Let's build something we can believe in Crypto needs belief again, not memes, not hope, not another locked token presale with a $300 million fully diluted valuation. Faith doesn't come from more, it comes from clarity, from a smaller surface area of what actually works. From agreements that care more about the product than the pump and dump. But we can build filters instead of firewalls. We can: Require greater transparency from token issuers Push exchanges to delist tokens based on integrity rather than revenue Creating incentives for protocols to become composable again Reward builders who ship real products, not just narratives Preferring fewer, higher-certainty bets over endless “repeating” The future isn’t about launching the next altcoin casino, it’s about creating systems that people can trust and stay with for longer than 90 days. The bull market will come again, it always does. But next time, let’s not waste it on another 30 million tokens that no one needs.