Crypto is a volatile market, with its magic, fun, and excitement, but also comes with unpredictable consequences. Tons of F0 investors lost money (even went bankrupt), and many founders of startup projects quickly kickstart their projects and then have to accept bitterness. Those consequences may come from an incomplete understanding of the “trend” in crypto, or the fact that many investors are too naive and have misconceptions about it. Hopefully, <a href="https://www.builder.news/" alt="builder news" title="Builder news website" target="_blank" rel="" class="">Builder.news</a> can provide another perspective on the trend in crypto so that investors or founders of projects understand where their position in the game is.<h2>Where did the crypto trend come from?</h2>Crypto is a pretty wild market. Each day, someone somewhere will begin creating their own project, with new ideas and experiments to reposition the game. Therefore, in all 100 experimental projects like that, it hits a certain market sentiment at a specific time, then it emerges quickly overnight. Together with the contribution of the KOLs, Celebs, Youtubers, and media outlets, those became a trend.The “trend” in crypto happens very fast, it may appear at the beginning of the year but will disappear within the next 6 months to 1 year. Within recent 3 years, there are 11 trends that market participants might have at least heard of as follows:<ol><li>Yield farming (as the start of Yam Finance)</li><li>Yield Aggregator (as the start of Yearn Finance)</li><li>“Fee on Transfer” (as the start of Core Finance)</li><li>“Reflect Finance” (as the start of RFI)</li><li>Meme coin (as the start of Dogecoin, Shiba Inu…)</li><li>IDO (as the start of PolkaStarter)</li><li>Play2Earn (as the start of Axie Infinity)</li><li>Metaverse (as the surprising start of Facebook)</li><li>Move2Earn or squat2earn, sex2earn, sleep2earn (as the start of StepN)</li><li>PFP NFT (like the start of CryptoPunk, Bored Ape Yacht Club)</li><li>Meme NFT with no roadmap, no utilities và terrible art (as GoblinTown.wtf).</li></ol><h4>The common pattern of “trend”</h4>Firstly, you will notice its tiny appearance somewhere, for example, a tweet on Twitter, a small talk from your colleagues, or an amateur video of which the views are low. When it appeared, usually, the majority of the mass would laugh at it, disregard it, and consider it a scam project due to the bizarre idea. In the meantime, a few investors would acquire these cheap hidden gems as a lottery and become project pioneers.Now you can somehow be aware of the trend’s first wave. After “cheap as chips” projects suddenly go 50 or 100 times the previous value in a night, the reaction of degen investors will be showing off their profit. At this point, doubts mixed with anger suddenly burst out in people’s minds. The heat can continue in a few more nights making these projects not only go hyper but also gain 1000, 10000 times the value from the time those risk-takers bought it.<img src="https://cdn.builder.news/news/11ecf2133acfb368a8e6023f659fee92.jpg" alt="dogecoin" title="dogecoin " width="600" height="750">The trend will actually start when the newly-launched but one-of-a-kind project is mentioned in every conversation. And, it’s time for news from the media to appear everywhere even a bunch of KOLS joined the “show” which makes people surrounding you become extremely anxious and keep pouring their money into the market with the hope of multiplying their profit. At this point, they are officially performing the F0 role in the market.The next evolution of the trend will be when copycat projects are introduced accordingly. Those with a similar roadmap, tokenomics, and even Smart Contract and UI understandably receive excessive attention and a huge amount of money from F0, making it x10, x50 profits as normal. As a result, a mindset of easy money will make you regard yourself as a goddess in investing.At this point, the downtrend has begun but you barely be aware of it. You will reassure yourself that those down lines and red 24h% are the market’s healthy correction, and things will get back to their initial order soon. F0s are anxious about the phenomenon, however, they cling more strongly to the primary belief of a recovery in the market thanks to reasonable advice from F1s and KOLs.The disastrous decrease in price will mark the official and visible downswing in trend. When the price starts to divide by 3, by 5, naive investors or F0s are now going back to carefully digest every piece of information relating to the project such as its dev team, roadmap, or actions on its official channels. Madness, anger, and frustration in F0s escalate as the price keep dumping and dividing by 10, 50 then 1,000. At this moment, they know they are trapped and suffered the most. Startups that "follow the trend" launched at this time can no longer raise funds as before.The trend died out, money flowed out of the trend. F0 will mostly consider crypto and everything related such as Play2Earn, Move2Earn, Metaverse, and NFT a scam and bitterly wiped their tears out of the market. Project owners are under great pressure from "self-proclaimed" VCs asking for a refund because they can't cash out in time to make a profit and from aggressive “diamond hands”. The team was notoriously labeled as a scam that withdrew money to buy a house or property while they haven't sold a single project token, or they have to spend most of the raised funds to stabilize the token price in the face of a huge market force.That’s how trends work in the crypto market. The circle will start all over again with a fresh project launched after a certain amount of time of the market’s depression. The rules of the game might be different, but the pattern is still the same. New generations of F0s and a bunch of enthusiastic startups labeled "scam" will inevitably be born, solely whales are getting “fatter”.<img src="https://cdn.builder.news/news/11ecf2133acfc45fa8e6023f659fee92.jpg" alt="scam" title="dogecoin " width="600" height="400"><h2>Startups’ misconceptions about “trends”</h2>Lots of founders would have naive ideas just like those investors mentioned above. P2E projects would even consider Axie Infinity as a successful case study, while <a href="https://www.builder.news/project-review/indepth-stepn-guide-5-minutes-to-know-movetoearn-model-LFgCP-A5Dmr-csXiY" alt="stepn" title="StepN Review" target="_blank" rel="" class="">StepN</a> is regarded as such by Action2Earn projects. They think they would achieve a comparable level of success if they released those tokens in a similar manner.Moreover, those startup founders would not spend a lot of effort on R&amp;D or seriously do research on those pain points, issues like the pioneers have shown. For example, Play2Earn/StepN is a Ponzi scheme in a nutshell, mostly the users earn by releasing the token reward from those who buy in (even NFT and token reward). Not saying Ponzi is a scam because to be fair this economy, the banking system, and the services industry realistically was a huge-scale Ponzi scheme. But when inflation increases and the onboard F0 stops, everything falls apart like Dominoes.Perhaps those startup founders were so anxious to raise capital and bootstrap their projects (which is very good based on-trend, because it attracts huge capital as well as a certain number of users from the beginning). And after that, they would think more in the long term and spend more effort on R&amp;D.But mostly these projects will go down soon (or barely survive like Zombies) when the trend passes. The trend comes and goes like a tidal wave, when the tide goes away strongly, there’s no way you can swim against the current no matter how good you are at swimming and ultimately you will drown fighting the current.You cannot compare those pioneers like Axie or StepN. You can make an argument such as “Their project is nothing different from mine, my solution is better than theirs”. But that is your second misconception (or naivety). The huge difference between Axie, StepN, and thousands of copy projects is the position. They have capital, a huge budget, a huge network, and a huge number of supportive users. They have enough resources and time for R&amp;D and improving the products. But your startup won’t last after 3-6 months after the trend passes.<img src="https://cdn.builder.news/news/11ecf2133acfde9da8e6023f659fee92.jpg" alt="axie" title="axie infinity" width="600" height="411"><h2>Yet... those “trends” in crypto are not that bad</h2>Personally, the Trend is neither good nor bad. The pattern in itself just takes its course. Only the misconceptions and the approaching way of the investors, startups, plus the chaotic escalation, the exploitation of the KOLs, Celebrities, Youtubers, and even those so-called journalists would turn things crazy, which made the naive people would spend money on the market without knowing what would happen.“Those scammers have their own innovation” - Victor Tran - Co-founder and CEO of Kyber Network - a decentralized exchange for cryptocurrencies said. Those projects themselves are just experiments. The important thing is that those serious projects will learn a lot from yield farming, meme token, PFP NFT, Play2Earn, and Move2Earn. They should consider it as a new direction that blockchain/crypto can bring in the future. After all, Satoshi Nakamoto also created Bitcoin based on a series of failed pre-digital experiments decades ago.Those ongoing trends will be a good time for them to catch the opportunity and go to the market, or even bootstrap their ecosystems. But right after that, they need to spend more effort on R&amp;D and improve the product as soon as possible, so that after the trend goes away, their project can create a somewhat intrinsic value and still can capture the users’ funds, as well as keeping the value of the token from falling into infinity. And in long term, when there are real users in their project, your product/service will have intrinsic value and high application of technology, then the growth of those projects will only be a matter of time.<h4>Few last words</h4>There is a sad but true fact that said “If you jump into the game without knowing where your profit will come from, then it could be you that would be someone’s profit.” It is true with lots of different meanings. Hoping that people stop making misconceptions about crypto’s trend, and invest in crypto in a safe way.<div class="pr-block-special">Disclaimer: This article is intended for and only to be used for reference purposes only. No such information provided constitutes advice or a recommendation that any investment or trading strategy is suitable for any specific name.</div>

 A different viewpoint on the cryptocurrency movement and what so-called "Trends" in the crypto market.

Do you know about "trends" in the Crypto market?