Late at night when checking market行情, I always see posts like: "Sui is surging fiercely, WAL is still at the bottom, jump in without hesitation!" paired with two candlestick comparison charts, motivational slogans, and a few rocket emojis. After seeing this many times, I recall scenes from 2021.

At that time, SOL was soaring, and a craze swept the community to find "eco treasure coins." A token called MAPS was promoted as the "leading infrastructure project in the Solana ecosystem," with the same rhetoric as today: the main chain is taking off, and ecosystem tokens will inevitably follow suit and rise. Everyone knows what happened later — SOL continued to skyrocket, but MAPS fell from $4 all the way down to $0.04.

This makes me think of a phenomenon: history may not repeat exactly, but it often rhymes. For friends who are being tempted by "high certainty" returns, I have to say a few words.

The key issue is here. In a bull market, funds do indeed flow from the main chain into ecosystem projects, but what flows out are idle funds, not genuine value investments. Where does this money go? Not into the most solid fundamentals, but into projects with the hottest narratives, the most aggressive pumpers, and the most active communities.

As a storage protocol, WAL's story itself seems dull — no one gets excited about the gradual development of storage infrastructure. In comparison, the explosive power of GameFi and Meme tokens is much stronger, and hot money naturally prefers those that can double in half an hour. Relying on hot money to patiently wait for "value discovery"? That idea might be too naive.

Another common pitfall is misreading sideways markets. Many people interpret sideways movement as "the main players leaving me a chance to jump in," but in reality, it might just be a silent trap. The most frightening thing in the crypto market isn't rapid crashes, but sideways consolidation mixed with slow declines — it drains your patience, destroys your confidence, until your cost basis turns into a loss.