Ryan Backus

> be me > 2015 > trading gold in WoW for real money > realize internet money already exists, find bitcoin > started taking part in ICOs, and realized I belong there > bought air jordans for 2 BTCs (my bitcoin pizza story) > learned the hard way that ETH, ETC are not the same thing > joined @CelsiusNetwork, witnessed the company grow from approximately $500M to $30B, then collapse to zero. > post FTX crash, did investigative work related to FTX > reconstructed financials from scratch > analyzed top 100 token distributions > arrived at the same conclusion every time > speculation is inevitable > most crypto apps are casinos, pretending otherwise makes them worse > 2025 > founded @Zerg_App, to give the game better rules

I think the part people underestimate is how much the bar for participation has changed. Each new phase becomes harder to access unless you’re fully plugged in with faster information and more competition. So the opportunity is now concentrated into smaller groups who understand the current meta earlier

Crypto is finished (for now) 2017: ICOs 2021: NFTs 2024: Memecoins … It’s been well over a year since Trump launched his coin marking the generational top of Memecoins A few years prior to that, the Bored Ape Yacht Club did the minting (ICO for NFTs kinda) for the Otherside which has since pretty has gone dark in CT but the team are still building for the few remaining members “Retail” flocked in the hardest at the top of each cycle. Both times indexes showing a very steep peak followed by a steeper decline and eventual slow death over years There will be a new way to make easy money and at first it will be a very niche market and by the time you see it you’re too late. You can’t keep a close eye on crypto while you have a 9-5 you have to be unemployed to stare all day endlessly I believe until the end of this year we will see crypto decline and most attention disappear and then a small group of people will begin making insane money in something that sounds dumb and slowly the ponzi will ponzi and exponentially grow until the biggest names in the world talk about it Stay vigilant, generational wealth awaits anyone who seeks it

CTOs did bring that energy and community push, but they were kind of a side effect of a broken launch process. The meta became let it rug first, then maybe revive it after, which slowly normalized poor launches as long as there was a chance to flip it later Now that liquidity is tighter and people are more aware, that second phase just doesn’t happen anymore From our perspective, it kind of reinforces the idea that the problem starts at distribution. If tokens were actually spread and aligned properly from the beginning, you wouldn’t need CTOs to save them. You’d just have a healthier starting point where communities form before things break.

Honestly one of the biggest issues that nobody really talks about is that ctos (community takeovers) basically don’t exist anymore Imo there the heart and soul of meme coins. There were always dedicated holders and believers who would step up to raid and actually push the project forward It created real momentum and Pump never made fostering CTOs a priority it just completely disappeared. If a coin got heavily jeeted people would group up and say “this is still a good coin” then they’d pay for dex raid and build hype etc now as soon as a coin dumps everyone knows a CTO isn’t coming so it just goes straight to zero with no second chance of life

Yeah agree. This is actually what keeps a chart healthy, because it’s big enough that people care, but not big enough to nuke price on exit, and when a lot of holders sit in that zone it naturally stabilizes things. This comes down to how tokens are allocated from the start, so it really just points back to distribution as the core problem. That’s exactly what we’re trying to fix with Zerg, making it easier to reach that kind of holder spread by design instead of hoping the market figures it out after launch where no one can nuke the chart, and no one is too small to be irrelevant

Having between 0.3 and 0.6% of a coin is the best. Top holders technically can’t sell and small holders won’t sell

Like we didn’t just reduce the cost of launching, we removed most of the friction around distribution, so now creation scales infinitely, but attention and capital don’t This turns into a race for extraction instead of a process of building. And when supply can be created instantly, but demand is still limited, the only variable left to compete on is who can capture liquidity the fastest So yeah something has to break, and it should be how access and distribution are handled at launch

The barrier to launching a token went from months to seconds. Five years ago, when I entered, there were a few hundred thousand; now it's over 70M+, which is insane There's only so much attention and capital to go around, and when you're splitting it across millions of tokens, the math stops matching. Something has to break, whether that's tokens launched, how they're valued, or whatever else. Greed is hardwired into this space, and that's never going away, but the structure around it has to evolve

@Megga At least it was an attempt to revive the space haha. We could see people trying to coordinate attention again instead of just pure random rotation, but yeah, the outcome kinda shows you can’t just schedule momentum and expect it to stick.

+2.3k today trading memecoins Honestly really dissapointed with how memescope monday turned out was really expecting to make like 1k sol today😭 Saw a lot of traders rinsing today and am honestly just happy to be up. Went from up 25 to breakeven like 2 times before being back up, every narrative was just infinite rotation. In high vol times like this it really is just who can adapt to those conditions and being selective on narratives that wont get vamped or die .5 seconds after you buy Also really wish we had pumpfun or bonk participating tdy, kinda sad to see neither of them show up will be live again tmrw❤️

There’s a simple truth about token distribution most people ignore: It’s not about how many people get in. It’s about how they get in. Last cycle optimized for speed, fastest wallets, biggest bundles, and earliest access. But that just concentrates supply and kills conviction before the chart even starts. Next cycle: focus on the distribution system that actually gives people a reason to stay.

Trying to fix the trenches without addressing the underlying mechanics is pretty much impossible. The current distribution model is optimized for early access, fast rotation, and concentrated supply, so naturally it rewards people who get in first and exit quickest Real change has to come from redesigning how tokens are distributed and how access is granted at launch We can't keep talking about being better, we need to actually be better.

The most egregious rapists to ever grace the trenches who sell before coins even hit 50k log on everyday and post about trying to fix the trenches There is no fixing the trenches because the trenches aren't broken, they are just a mirror of the soldiers who dig them

The bar is definitely higher now. In a bear market, vague promises and “we’ll build later” narratives don’t really hold up anymore. If a product doesn’t deliver real utility or give users a reason to stay, the churn shows up pretty quickly Last cycle was a lot more forgiving, but now attention is tighter, and capital is more selective.

pretty cool to see crypto going for more transparency / sustainability chains taking their time trying to build a moat vanity metrics becoming irrelevant focus shifting to actual users people hate it because it's less exciting but this is how we build something lasting

MetaDAO kind of tried to sit in the middle, which makes sense from a platform perspective (you don’t want to nuke every raise), but it also sets a pretty weird precedent because once teams can easily manipulate by interacting with markets tied to their own outcome as “just marketing" and have no responsibility to investors who bought into their action.

uhuh so if a team attempts crime and calls investors during a raise retards its a "Royleeism" and if i call people who use solana the n word im a racist? is that how its gonna be?

@shivst3r The slower ones usually spend more time getting the fundamentals right, product, users, and even how tokens are distributed, and that ends up giving them something most fast launches never get: time to actually build momentum instead of losing it immediately.

Projects that blew up overnight are the same ones that disappeared overnight. Easy come, easy go. Every sustainable company in this space was built slowly, quietly, and painfully before anyone on your timeline ever heard of them It's not exciting to talk about, but it's the truth. If what you're building is taking forever, you're probably on the right track.

Attention wasn’t as fragmented then, and liquidity wasn’t constantly getting drained across hundreds of launches. So when something caught momentum, it actually had room to run instead of being instantly rotated out of. Now it’s the opposite, too many tickers, too many players extracting, and attention gets split before anything can build.

Nothing will compare to the peace of 2024 when memecoins just begun. All we had were cat and dog coins and everything was going 100x There was no PVP, insiders or drama. Pure PVE.

A question I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: How do founders actually earn attention in a market flooded with new token launches? Here are my thoughts 👇

There’s definitely something like this happening, and I think it’s an entire layer of automated flow competing for the same liquidity By fragmenting attention and rotating liquidity, they’re essentially deciding which coin gets to look strong and which one gets invalidated, and stop capital from flowing naturally to strong narratives. In the end everything just gets stuck in this loop of short-term PvP and fake breakouts

Very sneaky form of PVP I’m just seeing. Say coin A and coin B are PVPing, coin A will use some automated system to automatically bid both coins in response to any viral news/ catalysts. Then it holds coin A, and sells off coin B. This kills the PvP because anyone watching coin B will see the candle, think they missed it- and not bid, then they’ll see it sell off, and again, think it must be bad, look at coin A, see its holding/ pumping, and think that must be good. Just takes a few of these to kill a coin typically. It steals the benefit of any catalysts, ruins the charts. Ugly business. Could be wrong ofc, but I’ve seen this pattern repeat itself in a very unnatural way that makes me feel confident in speculating.

I get the take, but the space also needs that type of "We will make it" energy. NFTs brought a level of culture and community that’s honestly missing right now. Those people then really identified with something, built around it, created content, and so on. That’s why they are still so attached to their jpeg pfp lol

super hot take: nfts were and is still one of the biggest distractions in this industry everyone was busy playing with jpegs for 3 years that the space forgot it actually needed real products we all lived in the delusion that it became crypto’s major selling point thankfully, we’re slowly waking up. look around you barely any nft mint gives proper profits (burger money) now it's cash in , grab profits and run. barely anybody holds :( (excluding jpeg owner and frens)

It’s kind of ironic how everyone keeps talking about real products, real use cases, long-term value, and all and then capital just keeps flowing into pure attention/gambling layers It's like VCs stopped caring about long-term and are just following where the demand actually is right now, which says a lot about the current state of the market

crypto VCs seem to be deploying more capital into pure gambling apps lately not sure what part of the cycle this is

This is kind of the structural problem, as these token deployers don’t really have a clean way to exit without nuking the chart, especially when supply is concentrated. So every exit ends up looking like this, regardless of intent. The only real fix is giving them a way to gradually distribute that allocation into a broader community instead of dumping it into thin liquidity. That’s actually something we’re trying to solve with Zerg, making distribution the focus so exits don’t have to destroy everything.

founder found himself, you lost your money 💀 bro locked 500M $WhiteWhale tokens, wrote a whole essay on why he's leaving and token dumped 60% in just single candle I personally never saw such exit plan with clean PR layer the "I did it for my kids" line while OUR bags are bleeding is actually diabolical. But I respect his audacity now it seems like $WhiteWhale was a fundraiser for one guys peace of mind and it had nothing to do with community and holders as always no one cared for community

i think it should be about distribution control. Supply control just means a few wallets decide everything, while distribution control is about how tokens actually get into people’s hands and who gets access You can have “perfect" supply control and still end up with a dead chart if it’s concentrated and exits at once But if distribution is done right, even large supply can be absorbed and held over time

If you believe in supply control you deserve your fate

It's the token distribution structure to be blamed. The game rewards speed, bots, and concentrated early access, so the majority that doesn't have access to those are expected to lose, leaving a few others to win. Change the mechanism, and we will see changes in these stats, too.

96% of traders on PumpFun have made less than $500. Less than a quarter of a percent have made over $10K Is this a skill issue? 🤔

A lot of these holders come from incentives like airdrops, points, short-term farming, and not actual conviction, so when the incentives stop, the holders count will also naturally decline. Distribution brings people in, but alignment is what makes them stay, so if most holders enter for extraction, you’ll always see this kind of decay curve.

Projects with the biggest 30D token holder decline on @tokenterminal ↓ • Lombard Finance $BARD: -47.8% | Currently at 16.7K holders • Space and Time $SXT: -13.9% | Currently at 9.5K holders • Hooked Protocol $HOOK: -8.2% | Currently at 202.5K holders • dForce $DF: -6.0% | Currently at 2.9K holders • BNB Attestation $BAS: -3.5% | Currently at 177.3K holders • Azuro $AZUR: -3.1% | Currently at 4.6K holders • SideShift $XAI: -3.0% | Currently at 954 holders • Impermax Finance $IBEX: -2.7% | Currently at 401 holders • Zama $ZAMA: -2.6% | Currently at 3.8K holders • StarryNift $SNIFT: -2.6% | Currently at 79.1K holders • Aave $AAVE: -2.4% | Currently at 191.9K holders • Ribbon Finance $RBN: -2.2% | Currently at 6.5K holders • Everclear $CLEAR: -2.2% | Currently at 1.7K holders • Ren $REN: -2.1% | Currently at 60.1K holders • OpenEden $EDEN: -2.1% | Currently at 5.5K holders

Binance is still a high bar to get listed on, but it doesn’t guarantee price appreciation anymore; if anything, it’s shifted closer to a liquidity event than a growth catalyst Projects tap into the exposure and volume, but without strong fundamentals or alignment, it just becomes another distribution moment for early holders exit entirely

Every listing on Binance went down in month. This fact swept out all of our previous trust around the slingshot called 'Binance listing'. Let's talk a bit more of the Binance Alpha - where listings are also stragedy. + Unknown names + Unclear use cases All Binance Alpha listings are seeking for volume from the Alpha Point program. Nothing more.