If VCs disappear, it means there’s nothing innovative left in the industry worth investing in. In that case, the industry is either dying or has matured enough with no room for growth. For example, have you ever heard of VCs in the oil, coal, or railway industries? Is there nothing new in the industry now? Of course not. New DeFi architectures, blockchain infrastructure for AI, RWA, DePIN, stablecoins—innovations are emerging one after another. The value of blockchain is increasingly being proven rather than disproven. So why are VCs seemingly disappearing? Just take a look at the announcements from top CEXs about new token listings over the past two years. They’ll only tell you that some random letters are about to be listed and urge you to gamble on it, without wasting a single word explaining why the project is being listed or what it actually does. Many retail investors spend months gambling against market manipulators without even knowing what the asset they’re trading is or how to use the product. CEXs have become heavily casino-like, and sometimes the casino even cheats. It’s said that the top criteria for listing on CEXs now are community hype, sufficient market-making funds, and whether the project is willing to offer enough free tokens as tribute. If these are the listing criteria, then the existence of VCs indeed becomes less meaningful. Most VCs don’t have the ability to help projects build communities, nor are they willing to help projects manipulate the market and gamble against retail investors. So rather than saying VCs are disappearing, it’s more accurate to say VCs are making different choices. Take us as an example: as of 2025, we’ve actually invested more money than in 2023 and 2024 combined. The number of projects we invest in has decreased, but the amount we invest per project has increased. First, we’re no longer keen on publicity. Publicity doesn’t serve much practical purpose beyond PR. In fact, if a project fails, the community will blame us along with the team. Early-stage projects, no matter how responsible the team is, have a high probability of failure. It’s better to wait until the project grows big and then tell the market, “This is one we invested in.” Second, many projects don’t even plan to issue tokens or cater to retail investors, so there’s no need for publicity. We’ll just celebrate when they ring the bell at their IPO. Looking at our schedule, at least 3-5 of our early-stage investments will go public on Nasdaq next year. Entrepreneurship is no longer limited to issuing tokens as the only exit strategy. We always welcome reliable entrepreneurs to reach out to us. But if you’re just creating a vaporware project to issue a worthless token, please don’t waste both our time.