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

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.

@Yennii56 In this market, you can't hold anything for longer than 2 hours because the extractors are just too fast these days where there’s liquidity, there's an expected rug pull lol

Never holding a trade overnight again Went from +60sol to -15sol 😭

@saracrypto_eth Sounds great in theory until you get a few -20% days and that resets everything lol Focus more on protecting your downside so that compounding can actually do its thing.

If you lose 1% every day, for 100 days. You will only be down 63% It you make 1% every day for 100 days. You will be up 170% or 2.7x

How do you guys avoid getting caught in PvP? For me, I’ve been building a system to help avoid playing the “which one dumps first” game altogether It will be a new setup where distribution is cleaner, no bundling, more even access, so you’re not instantly at a disadvantage from block one (part of why I’m building Zerg around this) Curious how everyone else is navigating it rn

Some of these platforms had a first-mover advantage and the right timing to bag. And yep, they could’ve done a few things way better, but let’s be real, user behavior has completely shifted too, so trying to patch the old stuff hoping it will somehow fix the space won’t cut it anymore. I think this needs a full systematic rethink of how tokens are distributed and launched, with fairer mechanisms, better transparency from minute one, and infrastructure that doesn’t reward snipers and insiders.

all the founders in the memecoin space right now give off the same energy as out of touch boomers who made millions by simply being born in the right place at the right time, but when push comes to shove would get lapped in terms of actual competency by an unpaid intern at the company they are ceo of i am fully confident that an average sub 80 iq trader right now could run half the platforms in this space better than their current founders do

Ideally, we shouldn’t have to rely on uncertainty to find an edge. The better setup is when you know it’s a good trade and still have fair access to it. Right now, most of the obvious good ones are gated by speed, and realistically, most people will never be the fastest. So the real improvement isn’t just finding less crowded trades, it’s creating systems where good trades aren’t decided in the first few seconds.

The trades where your average trader can blindly tell if it is a bad or good coin instantly are the ones they’re accustomed to seeing. The trades where you begin questioning and getting anxious in regards to its ceiling alerts & further potential are ones that are less crowded