On April 23rd, as Trump announced a reduction in tariffs on China, this news reignited market sentiment.
Investor confidence in risk assets quickly rebounded, with BTC silently rising 7%, with its price returning to $94,000.
Everything seemed to have come back overnight.
BTC is closer to breaking through the historical high of $100,000 at the beginning of the year, with Twitter filled with expectations of a new bull market. Traders in the secondary market are busy chasing gains and cutting losses, and the market seems to have returned to the passionate spring of 2021.
However, this emotional return does not belong to everyone.
The excitement is theirs, while primary investors may remain silent in the face of bull market signs.
Bull Market Dies from Lockup
The good news of BTC returning to $94,000 makes secondary market investors cheer, but for primary market investors, this carnival seems like a distant dream.
Most of their tokens are in a locked state and cannot be traded freely, and the market performance of the past year has caused them heavy losses.
A chart from STIX (@stix_co) reveals this cruel reality.
@stix_co is a platform focused on cryptocurrency OTC (over-the-counter) trading, providing liquidity support for locked tokens.
The chart compares the valuation changes of multiple tokens in May 2024 and April 2025: The May 2024 valuation is the OTC trading price (the price primary investors could sell during lockup), while the April 2025 valuation is the actual market price.
The results show that on average, these tokens' valuations have dropped 50% in one year.
Let's look at some specific examples.
BLAST's OTC valuation last year was $250 million, and its current market valuation is only $30 million, a drop of 88%; EIGEN dropped from $600 million to $150 million, a 75% decline; SCR is even worse, falling from $170 million to $25.5 million, a decline of 85%.
Almost all tokens have significantly dropped, with JTO being the only exception, rising from $100 million to $175 million, an increase of 75%.
But this is just an exception that cannot mask the overall bleak situation.
Simply put, if these primary investors did not sell their tokens through OTC trading last year, their average token value has been directly halved, with some reduced to just 10-20%.
As background knowledge, OTC trading allows primary investors to sell tokens before unlocking, usually at a discount.
Taran mentioned in the post that last year, these tokens' OTC trading prices were about 80-90% of their valuation.
This means if they had sold last year, they might have only lost 10-20%, or even broken even. But some investors chose to hold for a year, waiting for unlocking, resulting in an average token value drop of 50%, with some dropping 70-80%, significantly shrinking their wealth.
You might say their investment cost was low, so even with such a drop, they still have something to gain.
But the problem is the concept of opportunity cost in economics. For an investor, the theoretical opportunity cost loss is more painful than earning less (or possibly losing money).
In the theoretically optimal scenario, Bitcoin (BTC) has risen 45% in the past 12 months.
If primary investors had sold their tokens last year and converted to BTC, their money might have grown to 1.45 times the original amount.
But now, their token value is only 0.5 times, and may even be further discounted to 0.25 times when unlocked in the future.
In other words, compared to BTC's growth, their actual loss is as high as 82.8%; even calculated in dollars, they have lost 75%.
It's like watching others make big money while their own assets continue to shrink.
The "bull market" may have died from lockup for them.
Locked up for a year and losing half the value is most frustrating because:
After researching, comparing, identifying, and investing in projects and putting in effort, it's not as profitable as simply holding BTC.
In the classic investment book "A Random Walk Down Wall Street," there's a famous "Monkey Throwing Darts Theory."
Author Burton Malkiel proposed that if a blindfolded monkey randomly throws darts to select a stock portfolio, its long-term returns might not be worse than carefully selected professional investments.
This theory was originally used to satirize the ineffectiveness of over-analysis in the stock market, but today, applied to the cryptocurrency market, it feels particularly ironic.
Primary investors spend significant time and effort researching whitepapers, analyzing project prospects, and even enduring a year-long lockup to seek high returns, but the result might be: they might as well randomly throw a dart at Bitcoin.
BTC has risen 45% in the past year, while their locked tokens have dropped an average of 50% or more.
The valuation and investment logic of Altcoins may urgently need to be reshaped.
Spring Won't Come Back
Will the next wave of crypto Altcoins still use this lockup mechanism?
VCs entering at low prices, and the lockup mechanism was originally designed to protect early-stage projects from early investors causing price crashes through massive selling. But based on the past year's data, this mechanism has also exposed primary investors to significant risks.
The original post of the chart mentioned that over $40 billion in locked tokens will be unlocked in the future, meaning the market may face greater selling pressure. If new tokens continue to be locked at high valuations, investors might again fall into the vicious cycle of "locked up for a year, losing half the value".
Clearly, this lockup approach is no longer suitable for the current market environment.
Will the primary investment in crypto markets remain hot? Will the spring of primary investment return? Based on the current situation, the answer may not be optimistic.
In the past few years, Altcoins' high valuations were often built on market frenzy and liquidity premiums, but as the market gradually matures, investors are beginning to focus more on project actual value and liquidity.
The high risks of locked tokens make primary investors hesitant, and more people may choose more transparent and liquid projects.
Some emerging trends are already appearing: such as shorter lockup periods, lower valuation multiples, or even directly issuing MEME to reduce primary investment bubbles;
Of course, it might also be a new bottle with old wine, where under the seemingly fairer appearance of meme coins, the primary logic still exists, setting up markets and creating plates to make you unaware of the primary investment's existence.
For the entire crypto market, more transparent mechanisms have become particularly important. The lockup mechanism also needs to find a better balance point that can protect early-stage projects without exposing investors to excessive risks.
But then the question arises: if primary investors don't lose, secondary market investors don't lose, and retail investors don't lose, who will lose?
Crypto tokens do not produce value, but transfer value; for someone to gain, someone must lose.
The spring of one group inevitably means the winter of another.
