I see a lot of retail traders who lose money on contract trading blaming project teams or market makers, because some coins have pump-and-dump candlestick charts that are just mind-boggling. If this happened in traditional financial markets, a bunch of people would probably be in serious trouble. But I think they’re blaming the wrong people—or maybe they haven’t realized who’s really to blame. Think about it: when did these crazy pump-and-dump candlestick charts become the norm in the industry? And why is it like this? Ever since Binance started listing a ton of coins through alpha and stopped allowing project teams to distribute tokens to VCs according to TGE agreements, almost every coin has gone through a high-control phase, making it ridiculously cheap to manipulate candlestick charts. That’s when CEXs (centralized exchanges) fully turned into casinos. Price movements stopped being tied to fundamentals, and value investing became a joke. Even worse, the sense of honor among industry professionals hit rock bottom. KOLs (key opinion leaders) see themselves as casino promoters, VCs are switching industries, feeling embarrassed to even mention investing in Web3, and retail traders see themselves as gamblers.