Crypto veterans, who is your trading counterpart?

Original Title: "The Old Man Regiments: Who's Your Counter Party?"

Author: Tulip King

Translated by: Luffy, Foresight News

Alpha First:

• Retail investors did not participate in this cycle
• Your counterparties are seasoned veterans
• Go with the consensus

The beginning of every war is strikingly similar. The elders engage in irreconcilable debates over faith, power, and resources, and the ultimate solution is to send the young to slaughter each other. We all know the saying "the old declare war, the young go to die," but no one talks about what happens after the war.

As the war drags on and manpower dwindles, countries are forced to conscript from larger age groups. Suddenly, teenagers and middle-aged men appear in the trenches. By the final stages, you will see children and old men trembling with rifles in hand. This is our current situation in the cryptocurrency trenches.

We have long passed the peak moment of 2021

The Google search trend for "cryptocurrency" peaked during the summer of DeFi in 2021 and has not recovered since. Even though the "crypto bros" helped Trump get elected, they could only pull the search interest for "cryptocurrency" back to 61% of its previous high. It must be said that there is almost no fresh blood in the crypto trenches. If you are reading this article, congratulations, you are one of the "elders" still fighting in the trenches. Next, let’s formulate a survival plan.

Don't Be Afraid to Go with the Consensus

"The consensus is always wrong" is a common fallacy; knowing when to follow the crowd is a subtle art. Remember when Warren Buffett started buying Apple stock in 2016? It was already the largest publicly traded company in the world, not his typical "deep value investment." In this market, you need to be a compliant sheep, not go against the trend.

In the past cycles, the influx of new retail investors lowered the overall IQ and experience level in the crypto trenches. This allows you to easily leverage your experience to sell new Ponzi schemes to them. If we had retail participation on the scale of 2021, Launchcoin could easily break the $1 billion market cap, but now it hasn't even managed to break $400 million before starting to decline.

Remember, crypto Twitter is just a niche corner of the industry. We are all reading the same articles and complaining, staring at the same 5-minute charts on DEX Screener, trading the same tokens. This also means that projects like Launchcoin are already the fifth generation of harvesting memecoins we've seen, and people are simply not interested in playing that game again.

The opposite of this phenomenon is equally true. This is why Bitcoin and Hyperliquid outperform other networks. Everyone in the trenches has reached a consensus: we do indeed have faith in these tokens. Bitcoin has never let us down, and Hyperliquid is also a truly excellent product. As long as these tokens maintain a positive consensus sentiment, you can continue to accumulate.

In this cycle, the new influx of funds into consensus assets like Bitcoin and Hyperliquid will come from institutions and seasoned crypto traders who have given up on going against the trend.

Don't Go Against the Trend, Act Early

The market today lacks inexperienced retail investors, which also means it is difficult for you to make money by going against the trend. In this cycle, your counterparties are as smart as you are. If your counter-trend trade has not yet begun to gain consensus, it will not succeed.

Ethereum continues to underperform other networks

This is why the supporters of .eth cannot change the narrative around Ethereum. We have heard Bankless drone on about the same clichés countless times. Unless I see Vitalik tattooing the Ethereum L1 scaling roadmap on his forehead, you will never convince me to buy that "cursed coin" again. I’m smart; I swapped Ethereum for Bitcoin before most of you (early 2023), but I still regret holding it for so long. I believe others in the market feel the same way.

Instead of going against the trend, it’s better to get involved early in areas that have not yet been discussed. Don’t bet on your ability to fight the market; bet on your ability to study harder and dig for potential projects. The real advantage lies in discovering quality targets before consensus forms:

• Invest in new networks with imperfect bridging functions
• Buy small-cap tokens with high slippage
• Look for projects with poor user experience but great ideas

Reach out to your friends who are deeply involved in the Bitcoin and HyperEVM ecosystems, ask them which emerging projects they believe have not received enough attention, and dive deep into the project documentation. The strategy is not to fight the consensus but to delve into it faster than everyone else.

Where Will Institutional Funds Flow?

Although retail investors are watching from the sidelines, institutions are actually entering the market. The good news is: institutions are essentially "consensus market participants":

• They cannot invest in illiquid assets and must focus on the largest assets
• They cannot justify "counter-trend betting on Memecoins" to their investors; they have a fiduciary duty to make reasonable decisions
• They act slowly but have large amounts of capital, creating predictable trends

Even better, institutional movements are relatively easy to predict because there are only two large-scale business models:

Asset Management / Custody: Institutions like BlackRock want to custody the largest assets to achieve the highest returns. Their ETF inflows will first benefit Bitcoin and may spill over to other large-cap assets like XRP.

Volume / Volatility: Institutions like Citadel Securities make money by trading more intelligently than you on the order book. They need markets that are liquid and reasonably volatile, which is exactly what Hyperliquid provides in the derivatives space.

So ask yourself: what is the largest custodial asset by consensus? Bitcoin. Now ask yourself: where is the consensus venue for new assets on exchanges? Hyperliquid. Don’t try to outsmart institutions; sometimes it’s that simple—position yourself where institutional funds will flow, not where you think they should go.

Areas Where Retail Investors Might Enter

AI hype is still on the rise

Finally, let’s leave a hedging strategy. The search interest for "AI" has been climbing to new highs nearly three years after the launch of ChatGPT. The intersection of cryptocurrency and AI has the potential to attract capital inflows.

However, how this will develop remains unclear. Will retail investors actually buy crypto projects, or will they continue to chase Nvidia? Will they buy crypto projects like Bittensor or Sam's Worldcoin? The AI narrative may be the only catalyst strong enough to bring retail investors back to the crypto market. But it may only benefit specific projects rather than lead to a broad rally.

Advantages of Veterans

The absence of retail investors does not mean that this bull market cannot be profitable; it will simply reward different skills. Veterans still in the trenches have the following advantages:

• The ability to identify trend shifts before the narrative fully forms
• Understanding of market cycles and judgment on when to take profits
• A network for sharing information with other veterans
• Proven risk management strategies

This cycle will reward patience, discipline, and the ability to go with the consensus while positioning early in emerging narratives. It will not reward counter-trend bets against established trends or attempts to revive dead narratives.

Fighting in the crypto trenches is not easy, but for those who adapt to the new battlefield environment, the rewards will be substantial. The veteran legion may be smaller than the retail army of 2021, but we are smarter, more experienced, and better at capturing value.