The cryptocurrency world is not maturing, but rather experiencing disordered entropy growth.

The cryptocurrency market is experiencing a state of "disordered entropy growth" rather than maturation, characterized by an overwhelming number of tokens (potentially millions) that fragment liquidity and confuse retail investors. This environment leads to several critical issues:

Liquidity Black Hole: Capital is spread too thin across thousands of tokens, preventing meaningful growth and encouraging market manipulation.
Broken Infrastructure: Many protocols are upgradeable and prioritize short-term gains over reliability, breaking composability and isolating liquidity.
Unsustainable Practices: Excessive tokens, low-quality projects, and rampant manipulation (e.g., fake volume, insider pumps) degrade user trust and builder effectiveness.

Proposed solutions include:

Enhancing token transparency and encouraging exchanges to delist based on integrity.
Incentivizing composable protocols and rewarding builders for real products.
Supporting industry consolidation to reduce noise and focus on utility.

The future of crypto depends on building trustworthy systems, not launching unnecessary tokens, to restore faith and ensure long-term viability beyond short-lived hype cycles.

Author: jawor

Compiled by AididiaoJP, Foresight News

When people are overwhelmed with choices, they actually have fewer. In one famous study, a table of 24 jams attracted a large crowd, but few bought anything. What happened when the choices were reduced to six? Sales skyrocketed.

A complex paradox.

Now apply this paradox to cryptocurrency. We have over 20,000 listed tokens, and if you count all the experiments, failed projects, memes, and abandoned sidechains, the total could reach 50 million. This is insane. The casino is not only open, but infinite. Infinite tables, infinite tokens, and infinite meta-consumption.

The result? No one knows what to bet on.

Retail investors stand no chance. The wallet user experience is a minefield. You bridge across chains, pay fees, forget to revoke authorization, and are left with ten dead tokens. Most new users leave within 90 days. It's brutal, but not surprising. We make this intentionally difficult, not to protect value, but to chase it.

The deeper problem is that cryptocurrency no longer feels genuine. We talk about decentralization and financial freedom, but every week brings a new Trumpcoin, a new insider pump, another "influencer-led" exit. All this happens while liquidity fragments, narratives cannibalize, and attention spans grow increasingly thin.

This is not the market maturing, but disorderly entropy increase.

Liquidity is a joke now

Even if capital flows in, it no longer drives the market like it used to. Why? Because funds are spread across thousands of tokens. Everyone wants an "altcoin season," but there's no room left. Trying to blow up 1,000 balloons with one breath is simply impossible.

Take Axiom, for example, which has amazing technology but instead of creating new liquidity, it simply siphons user capital away without injecting it back into the market. Or look at all those OTC trades that dilute supply but don’t show up on the books until insiders decide to sell.

We are building a liquidity black hole, not a flywheel.

When the pool is being drained faster than it is being filled, you get not just price stagnation, but market manipulation.

Manipulation has become cheap. Time-weighted average price (TWP) gaming, oracle exploits, and fake trading volume are all easy. Governance has become a joke. Voter turnout has plummeted, whales have seized everything, and Sybil attackers have farmed with 30 wallets unnoticed.

This is not just a problem for users, builders feel it too.

Teams burn millions of dollars launching the "next layer 1 network" without product-market fit. Projects chase the same original concept with slight variations. Composability is broken because everyone optimizes for token value rather than protocol stability. Mutable infrastructure stifles innovation.

The fundamental DeFi building blocks used to be immutable, something other builders could rely on. Now most protocols are upgradeable, prioritizing short-term revenue over reliability.

This had a knock-on effect:

Builders cannot build on the infrastructure securely
Liquidity becomes isolated
Protocols become isolated fiefdoms

We broke the money Lego set and now we’re playing with loose bricks.

This is unsustainable

Most of these tokens shouldn't exist. But in crypto, permissionless = inevitable. Anyone can launch anything. You can't stop it.

But perhaps we can shape the environment.

Centralized exchanges still act like value-neutral platforms. They delist tokens when trading volume dries up, not when teams disappear or ecosystems decay. This needs to change. Initiatives like @blockworksres's Token Transparency Framework are a start, but imagine if there were multiple token rating agencies, and their average scores could influence centralized exchanges' listing/delisting decisions.

This isn’t censorship, this is curation, and it’s desperately needed.

Venture capital money is drying up, and mid-tier projects can no longer easily secure funding rounds. The second quarter of 2025 saw record M&A volume. Coinbase acquired Deribit and Echo. Stripe acquired Bridge. We're talking about billion-dollar deals. Why? Because the space has too many moving parts and too little utility.

That's not noise, that's integration.

Too many projects chasing the same idea? They get merged.

Too many tokens dilute the narrative? They get eliminated.

Too many chains are unattractive? They go bankrupt.

Less noise, more signal.

Let's build something we can believe in

Crypto needs belief again, not memes, not hope, not another locked token presale with a $300 million fully diluted valuation.

Faith doesn't come from more, it comes from clarity, from a smaller surface area of what actually works. From agreements that care more about the product than the pump and dump.

But we can build filters instead of firewalls.

We can: