Often overlooked is the fact that venture capital firms are far more fearful of current high-market-cap projects than most imagine. Teams still working tirelessly on the front lines to incubate projects feel this even more deeply.

Looking back at this cycle, especially the data around 2024, reveals some clues. The market cap peaks of VC tokens are astonishing:

$STRK soared to over $50 billion
$SAGA reached $7.6 billion
$W touched $16.5 billion
$ZK peaked at $6.3 billion
$DYM stayed at $5.2 billion
$ETHFI hit a peak of $4 billion
$ALT reached a high of $3 billion

This history has cultivated a market psychology—PTSD. Once the consensus forms that "high FDV new tokens will eventually decline," the situation tends to self-fulfill this expectation. Airdrop profit-takers start reducing their holdings at rebounds, retail investors simply short during rebounds. This coordinated game of tug-of-war operates silently.

VCs and project teams have become obsessed with burning and buybacks, for a very practical reason: the story of price appreciation no longer holds up at the valuation expectation level. They can only rely on real revenue, genuine buybacks, burns, and distributions—topics that were almost forgotten in the last cycle.

But people always find countermeasures. Most retail investors quickly see through this: these so-called value captures are mostly eaten up by foundations and market makers, and DAO protocol income, nominally belonging to the community, is still controlled by the companies.

Adding to this, some false demands have been broken—staking yields mainly come from inflation, and staking itself is a disguised form of delaying selling. Demand suddenly drops, and many nodes shut down. VC tokens have lost even their last moat—staking.

If nothing unexpected happens, the core story of the next cycle will return to fair launch, rather than the hype of VC clone seasons.