Why is the crypto primary market dying so fast? We were once one of the most active investment firms, and over the past decade, we’ve seen the problems become increasingly clear. First, the narratives have collapsed: from white papers and institutional endorsements to inflated TVL, the market basically no longer buys it. Second, supply is out of balance. There are now tens of thousands of projects, making it extremely difficult for excellent ones to stand out. Third, the 1➕3 vesting mechanism is essentially designed to kill VCs, letting projects, market makers, and exchanges exit first. Fourth, there’s the cost of getting listed. Why do primary-market projects now need high valuations and large funding rounds? Mainly because listing on several leading exchanges costs an average of tens of millions of dollars. VCs have plenty of problems too, but without substantial VC support for the primary market, all that’s left is active token-launching syndicates and MEME coins. The primary market is a vital source of crypto innovation, and industry leaders need to genuinely focus on building. For example, Binance should improve its listing criteria; under its current model, even Vitalik’s ETH wouldn’t have been listed on Binance back then. Next, the 1➕3 vesting mechanism should be abolished altogether. VCs take on the greatest risk and shouldn’t be saddled with the worst vesting terms. Whether a project succeeds or fails is fundamentally not up to VCs. Finally, crypto projects need to return to generating real revenue and buying back tokens. The most important factors behind the U.S. stock market’s sustained prosperity over so many years have been earnings growth and a commitment to returning value to shareholders. That’s what industry leaders should be doing, so that secondary-market investors can find genuinely high-quality projects.