Not every ICO struggles due to valuation issues, poor timing, or flawed tokenomics. That's the surface-level explanation most people lean on.

Look at other projects—some managed to find buyers even in similar market conditions. Take ZKpass as an example; it navigated the same landscape differently.

The real problem? Platform saturation among core users. The most engaged community members were already stretched too thin, holding too many tokens, farming on too many protocols. They'd hit their capacity.

When your most active users can't absorb new allocations, it becomes nearly impossible to build momentum. These aren't passive holders; they're the ones who drive adoption, provide liquidity, and create visibility. Once they're maxed out, spreading the word to fresh capital becomes exponentially harder.

It's less about the project's fundamentals and more about the ecosystem's current user bandwidth.