It took me longer than I’d like to admit to learn this, but it’s now one of my strictest rules in crypto:
I don’t buy tokens right after they list.
Not because I’m bearish on innovation.
Not because I hate new projects.
But because experience is a brutal teacher—and this lesson was expensive.
The Illusion of a “Strong Launch”
In 2025 alone, hundreds of hyped projects entered the market with starting valuations in the hundreds of millions, sometimes even billions.
At launch, they all looked the same:
Clean charts
Loud hype
Influencers everywhere
Headlines screaming “next big thing”
And almost every single one of them did the same thing eventually:
They bled.
Many of them 80–90% down from their highs.
At first, this feels confusing.
The project looks fine. The chart looks stable. The community is loud.
So what’s actually happening?
The Supply Trap No One Talks About
When a token lists, only a fraction of its supply is live.
The rest?
Team tokens
Investor allocations
Advisor shares
Ecosystem funds
All locked.
With limited supply, price floats easily.
And when price floats, hope floats with it.
Then reality shows up.
Unlocks: The Silent Killer
Unlocks don’t arrive all at once.
They arrive slowly, predictably, and relentlessly.
Early investors and teams receive tokens they got close to zero cost.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth:
They don’t need belief.
They need liquidity.
So they sell.
Not because the project failed.
Not because they hate it.
But because turning paper gains into real money is the entire point.
Those tokens hit the market, sell pressure increases, and the chart starts doing what most post-listing charts do best:
Rot. Slowly. Quietly. Consistently.
The Bigger Problem: Most Tokens Aren’t Needed
This part hurts even more.
Many products today work perfectly fine without their token.
The app runs.
The protocol functions.
Users don’t care.
The token exists mainly to:
Raise funds
Incentivize early adoption
Create speculation
But without real utility, there’s:
No organic demand
No reason to hold
No reason to buy—except hoping someone else pays more later
That model thrived in past cycles.
It doesn’t anymore.
Too Many Tokens, Too Little Demand
The market today is overcrowded.
There are:
Too many assets
Too many narratives
Too many “revolutionary” tokens
Capital is no longer desperate.
It’s selective.
We’re entering a cleanup phase.
Most tokens won’t die dramatically.
They’ll simply fade into irrelevance.
Only tokens that are:
Actively used
Deeply integrated into products
Necessary for value flow
will survive long term.
My Rule Now
I don’t touch tokens that:
Listed recently
Have heavy unlocks ahead
Depend purely on hype for demand
I’d rather miss the first 2x
than hold through a slow 90% bleed.
I’m done being exit liquidity for:
Teams
Early investors
Vesting schedules disguised as “roadmaps”
Final Thought
New listings are exciting.
They’re loud.
They feel like opportunity.
But most of the time, they’re just well-timed distribution events.
I’ll go deeper into how I evaluate token supply, unlocks, and real utility in a future post.
For now, if this saves you even one bad trade—
it was worth writing