No matter how the cycles change, exchanges and market makers always remain at the top of the food chain.

In 2025, the productivity revolution in the crypto market is not AI, but token issuance.

Dune data shows that in March 2021, there were about 350,000 tokens across the network; a year later, this number rose to 4 million; by the spring of 2025, it had surpassed 40 million.

In four years, the number has expanded a hundredfold, with tens of thousands of new coins being created, launched, and going to zero almost every day.

Although the myth that issuing tokens can make money is being shattered, it cannot withstand the determination of project teams wanting to issue tokens. This token issuance assembly line has also supported a large number of agencies, exchanges, market makers, KOLs, media, and others who provide services. Perhaps it is becoming increasingly difficult for project teams to make money, but every gear in the factory has found its own profit model.

So, how does this "token issuance factory" operate? And who is truly profiting from it?

Token Issuance in Half a Year

“The biggest change in this cycle compared to the previous one is that the token issuance cycle has been extremely compressed; from project initiation to TGE, it may only take half a year,” said Crypto Fearless, a KOL in the crypto space with 200,000 followers who has long focused on project issuance, in an interview.

In the last cycle, the standard path for project teams was to spend a year refining the product, then use another six months to build the community and promote the market, until they had a certain scale of users and revenue data before being qualified to launch TGE.

But by 2025, this logic has completely reversed. Even for star projects listed on top exchanges or teams at the infrastructure level, the cycle from concept initiation to launch can be compressed to within a year or even half a year.

Why?

The answer lies in an open secret of the industry: the importance of products and technology has significantly decreased; data can be fabricated, and narratives can be packaged.

“It doesn’t matter if there are no users; just create a few million active addresses on the testnet, or go to a niche market and inflate the download numbers and user counts on the App Store, then find an agency to package everything else. There’s no need to stubbornly focus on products and technology,” Crypto Fearless bluntly stated.

As for Memecoins, they have pushed the concept of “speed” to the extreme.

Launch a coin in the morning, and by the afternoon, its market cap might exceed tens of millions of dollars. No one cares about their utility; they only look at whether it can ignite emotions within a minute.

The cost structure of projects has also changed drastically.

In the last cycle, most of the costs for a project from initiation to launch were spent on research and development and operations.

In this cycle, the costs for project teams have suddenly changed dramatically.

The core costs are the listing fees and market maker-related costs, including various intermediaries' interests; secondly, there are marketing expenses for KOLs, agencies, and media. A project may spend less than 20% of its total costs on products and technology from initiation to launch.

Token issuance has transformed from a long-term entrepreneurial endeavor into a quickly replicable industrial assembly line process.

From shouting "Mass Adoption" to "Attention is King," what has happened in the crypto space in just a few years?

Collective Disenchantment

If one word could summarize the last crypto cycle, it would be “disenchantment.”

In the previous bull market, everyone believed that L2, ZK, and privacy computing would reshape the world, and that “GameFi and SocialFi” could bring blockchain into the mainstream.

But two years later, those once-hopeful technological narratives and product narratives have fallen one after another. L2 is unused, blockchain games are still burning money, and social platforms are still trying to attract new users. Their common feature is that there are no real users.

In their place, however, is the most ironic protagonist, Memecoin. It has no product and no technology, yet it has become the most effective narrative.

Retail investors have become disenchanted, and project teams have also understood the rules of the game.

In the last cycle, the worst off were not the project teams that “did nothing,” but rather those who worked hard.

For example, a certain blockchain game project raised tens of millions of dollars, and the team invested all the money into game development, hiring top game designers, purchasing AAA art resources, and building server clusters. Two years later, the game finally launched, but the market no longer cared; the token price plummeted by 90%, the team ran out of money, and announced dissolution.

In stark contrast is another project that also raised tens of millions of dollars, but the team only hired a few people and had an outsourced team develop a demo, using the remaining funds to buy Bitcoin. Two years later, the demo is still a demo, but the asset balance has tripled.

The project team not only survived but also had money to continue “telling stories.”

The tech-focused teams died in the long development cycles, the product-focused teams died at the moment their funding chains broke, while the speculators saw the truth and found “certainty” in a simpler way: creating chips, capturing attention, and exiting liquidity.

After being harvested by projects that “did real work” time and again, retail investors have long lost patience and no longer care about so-called fundamentals.

Project teams know that users don’t care, and exchanges know all of this too; the interest structure has quietly been reshaped.

Winner Takes All

No matter how the cycles change, exchanges and market makers always remain at the top of the food chain.

Exchanges do not care about the rise and fall of token prices; they care more about trading volume. The profit model in the crypto space has never been about token prices; it is about capturing volatility.

If one were to select the most iconic product innovation of this cycle, Binance Alpha is undoubtedly the watershed.

In the view of industry practitioner Mike, it is a “genius design,” comparable to Binance’s second business model revolution.

“It kills three birds with one stone, completely revolutionizing the model of spot listings,” Mike commented. First, Binance achieved a curve-over-take of OKX Wallet through Alpha, incorporating on-chain asset issuance into its ecosystem; second, it activated the entire BSC chain, even making leading public chains like Solana feel threatened; finally, Alpha delivered a dimensional blow to second- and third-tier exchanges, causing their listing businesses to plummet.

The most ingenious part is that all Alpha projects are essentially nutrients for BNB; the popularity of each Alpha project translates into demand for BNB. In 2025, the price of BNB continues to break new highs, which is not coincidental.

But Mike also pointed out the side effects: Binance Alpha has completely industrialized and streamlined the listing process, with many participants not caring about what the project is about; they are simply focused on accumulating points, claiming airdrops, and selling.

Mike understands Binance’s motivation; Binance once attempted to launch game and social products claiming to have millions of users, but the results were not only poor for the tokens but also faced ridicule and criticism. “So they simply used Binance Alpha + Perp to create a standardized listing model, benefiting BNB holders, BSC, and exchange users.”

The only cost is that this market has gradually abandoned the pursuit of “value” and fully turned to the competition for “traffic and liquidity.”

Fundamentals are not important; the price itself has become the new fundamental, making market makers who work with K-lines increasingly important.

In the past, what people referred to as market makers were more “passive market makers,” providing buy and sell quotes on the exchange order book to maintain market liquidity and earn the bid-ask spread.

But by 2025, more and more active market makers are starting to become the main players behind the scenes.

They do not wait for the market; they create the market. The spot market is a tool, while the contract market is their main battlefield.

Market makers accumulate positions at low levels while opening long positions in the contract market, then continuously pump the spot market to attract retail investors to chase the rise. The long positions in the contract market take profits, then suddenly crash the market, trapping retail investors in spot and causing contract liquidations. Market makers then use short positions to harvest, and when the price drops to the bottom, they accumulate again, starting the next cycle.

This model, which feeds on volatility, has given rise to many “meme coins” during the altcoin bear market, from MYX to the recently popular COAI and AIA. Each “myth” is a precise double kill of longs and shorts.

But pumping requires capital, so off-exchange financing has become a new big business in this cycle.

This financing is different from traditional leveraged trading; it specifically targets market makers and project teams for “pump financing.” The capital provider offers cash, the market maker provides operational capabilities, and the project team provides token chips, with everyone sharing the profits.

KOLs Enter the Game

Pumping is often the best marketing, but it also requires someone to take over.

Especially when the token issuance cycle shortens, project teams need to gain heat, traffic, and consensus in a short time. Under this logic, KOLs and agencies that can gather and manage KOLs become increasingly important; they are the “traffic valves” on this token issuance assembly line.

Project teams usually collaborate with KOLs through agencies. Crypto Fearless states that the token issuance assembly line in the crypto space is filled with various agencies that can help project teams generate heat, market, attract users, promote, and build consensus.

In his view, “In the current market environment, earning intermediary fees is much easier than doing projects. Doing projects doesn’t necessarily mean making money, but the money spent on token issuance is essential. Now, there are agencies in the market that come from exchanges, VCs, and those that have transitioned from KOLs and media…”

The reason project teams are willing to pay intermediary fees instead of directly finding KOLs is for efficiency and to mitigate risks.

Within agencies, there are three levels of traffic classification for KOLs.

The first is brand traffic. This refers to the different pricing for top KOLs versus ordinary KOLs, as top KOLs have already established their personal brands, naturally commanding higher prices.

The second is exposure traffic. This refers to the number of people reached by the content, mainly determined by the KOL’s follower count and the reading volume generated by their posts.

The third is buying traffic. This refers to the number of transactions or conversions completed by the content. Typically, project teams will calculate the weight of these three types of traffic classification based on their needs; spending more money does not necessarily yield better results.

Additionally, to form a strong bond with KOLs, project teams are now also establishing KOL rounds early on, offering KOLs a certain amount of tokens at a lower price to help them better complete “shilling.”

This token issuance assembly line has become the "new infrastructure" of the crypto industry.

From the listing review of exchanges to the control methods of market makers, from off-exchange financing support to the attention capture of agencies, KOLs, and media, every link has been standardized and streamlined.

Ironically, the efficiency of making money in this system far exceeds the traditional path of making products, accumulating users, and creating value.

Will the crypto market continue like this?

Perhaps not. Each cycle has its own main storyline, and the next cycle may be very different.

But while the form may change, the essence will not.

Because from the very beginning, this market has been competing for two things: liquidity and attention.

And for everyone involved, the more pressing question is:

Do you want to be the one who creates liquidity, or the one who provides liquidity?

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