This altcoin game looks like project competition on the surface, but at its core, it’s about grabbing retail investors' funds and attention, and ultimately, their exit liquidity. From the perspective of retail investors as a whole, it’s more like a zero-sum game. Project teams issue tokens at almost zero cost and exchange them for real money; exchanges, market makers, KOLs, and various channels take a cut at every layer. In the end, the ones truly paying the price are often just the buyers. For many project teams, this is more like a one-shot game. When the token goes to zero, they just rebrand, change the narrative, and target a new group of people—it’s very low-cost. So for retail investors to actually make a positive return, the conditions are harsh: either the project generates real cash flow that gets distributed to the token, or you manage to get in earlier and exit earlier than most others in the narrative chain. Without these two advantages, don’t think of yourself as a player—you might just be the liquidity.