MarketsBitcoinAltcoinsEthereumOpinion
|7 min ReadDumb Money Wealth Creation Cycles
Maya Chen
Senior Analyst
Published
Jan 16, 2026
Alpha Briefing: Crypto’s “dumb money wealth cycles” have been dead for nine months, leaving CT frustrated as no major onchain meta has replicated the explosive compounding of ICOs, DeFi Summer, NFTs, Ordinals, or the 2023–25 meme era. The engines that once let newcomers turn crumbs into fortunes have either matured, been solved, or been broken by extraction. Everyone is waiting for the next true wealth flywheel, and nothing obvious has appeared.
For nearly a decade, crypto’s greatest magic trick was simple. Any random person with a phone, some free time, and the cognitive horsepower of a housecat could turn a tiny stack into a life-changing bag. That power created entire eras of nouveau-riche degeneracy. It also trained an entire generation to expect one big wealth event every cycle.
Those seasons followed the same pattern every time. A major asset stayed cheap. Onchain compounding exploded. Then the major itself ripped. Suddenly the dumbest person you knew was telling their friends how they turned scraps into six figures. Liquidity flooded in. The mania fed itself. And then the bubble detonated.
Let’s walk through the history, because the past explains exactly why CT feels hollow in late 2025.
ICO Mania: The First Great Gold Rush
The 2017 ICO era was the original dumb money carnival. There were maybe 200 coins total. None of them worked. None needed to. You had a whitepaper, a gradient logo, and a promise that meant nothing. Everyone piled ETH into random token sales and watched their bags teleport upward.
Everyone traded the same few coins. The goal was always the same. Get more ETH. It was stupid. It was free money. And it pulled in wave after wave of fresh meat, all convinced that if the dumbest guy in the group chat could make 100,000 dollars, so could they.
Then the music stopped. The bleed lasted two years.
DeFi Summer: Food Coins, Yield Games, And Early DeFi Legends
In 2020–21, DeFi Summer erupted around COMP. Liquidity mining changed everything. For the first time you could yank yield out of thin air, loop assets, farm emissions, and aped food coins with names that sounded like sneeze noises.
Once again, the pattern was clear. There were only a handful of important tokens. ETH began appreciating fast. Tools were primitive, extraction was inefficient, and those who figured it out early printed insane gains. Many of today’s CT “OG legends” were born here.
NFTs: The JPEG Industrial Complex
COVID hit. People were locked at home, bored, online 24/7. Clubhouse. Spaces. Airdrops. Stimulus checks. The NFT mania of 2021–22 was the most absurd wealth event imaginable.
You’d mint a hideous picture for 1 ETH. Wake up and sell it for 20. Watch it run to 50. Nobody believed the valuations. Nobody cared. The game was converting a sliver of ETH into a mountain of ETH with zero skill involved.
Ordinals repeated the effect in early 2023. BTC was flatlined and early inscriptions turned dust into fortunes. Then BTC went vertical and everyone holding the jpegs got obliterated. The cycle completed its familiar arc.
Meme Season: The Longest Dumb Money Party Ever
Between 2023 and early 2025, memes became the most powerful wealth engine in crypto history. BONK, PEPE, WIF. The Solana side especially turned the entire market into a 24/7 casino where absolutely useless tokens ripped to billions.
Early on, you could toss 1,000 dollars at a random coin and be statistically guaranteed a 10x by morning. Bots were dumb. Liquidity thin. Devs incompetent. Every day you stacked more ETH or SOL. For many, it was the first time they made real money.
Then the ecosystem professionalized. Bots got sharper. Ruggers industrialized. Retail stopped shoveling in fresh capital. And then the real killshot landed.
TRUMP. MELANIA. LIBRA. The Hayden Davis moment. A single insider extraction event in the hundreds of millions, happening in a second. Overnight it became clear the game was cooked. Nothing bigger was coming. The meta collapsed.
Why CT Is Miserable In Q4 2025
It has been about nine months since that killshot. Majors have run well, especially Bitcoin. But there has not been a single broad wealth-compounding meta. No mechanism where you multiply your majors and then watch those majors appreciate.
NFTs? Solved. The players left can fit in a minivan.
Memes? Solved. It is safer and more profitable to be a nonstop serial deployer than a trader. The extraction window is razor-thin. Everyone else is exit liquidity.
Onchain ponzis? Only sharks survive. You need near-perfect timing. One late exit and you are cooked.
Back to ICOs? Maybe. Monad ran well. But nothing looks like a full ecosystem wealth flywheel yet.
This absence of a dumb money engine is the entire reason CT feels bitter, bored, and exhausted. People got addicted to the expectation that every year or two, some idiot-proof opportunity would triple their net worth. And now it has been almost a year of straight dirt.
Unless you hold a mountain of BTC, it has not been fun.
Waiting For The Next Meta
After posting about how stale the onchain landscape feels, the author heard from teams building new primitives. That includes , sponsor of this piece, which is working on tokenized RWA-style products aimed at retail. Think yield-enabled Wall Street instruments, but onchain, with more accessible sizing.
RWA is a sector with long-term potential. Equity perps. Tokenized stocks. Institutional-grade yield streams. But most RWA projects so far have failed to impress. The author is testing Zigchain’s stack to see whether this is one of the few exceptions backed by real usage. Their previous app, Zignaly, reportedly has over 400,000 users.
Whether RWA becomes the next wealth engine is unclear. But exploring fresh primitives is better than stagnation. CT needs new ideas. New mechanics. New ways to create asymmetric upside.
The author promises more testing, more experiments, more reports, and more Kalshi crypto updates. Because, frankly, the timeline needs more curiosity and less misery.
If you made it to the end, thank you. This whole space runs on the weird magic of strangers on the internet choosing to read and think together. With luck, the next big cycle is already forming in someone’s repo — we just haven’t seen it yet.
Disclaimer: This document is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views expressed in this document are not, and should not be taken as, investment advice or recommendations. Recipients should do their own due diligence, taking into account their specific financial circumstances, investment objectives and risk tolerance, which are not considered here, before investing. This document is not an offer, or the solicitation of an offer, to buy or sell any of the assets mentioned.