When issuing coins becomes a production line

In 2025, the productivity revolution in the crypto market is not AI, but issue coin.

Dune data shows that in March 2021, there were about 350,000 tokens across the network; a year later it rose to 4 million; by the spring of 2025, this number had surpassed 40 million.

In four years, it has expanded a hundredfold, with almost tens of thousands of new coins being created, launched, and going to zero every day.

Although the myth that issuing coins can generate profits has been shattered, it cannot withstand the determination of project teams to issue coins one after another. This coin issuance assembly line factory has also supported a large number of agencies, exchanges, market makers, KOLs, and media that provide services. Perhaps it is becoming increasingly difficult for project teams to make money, but every gear in the factory has found its own profit model.

So, how does this “issue coin factory” actually operate? And who is really profiting from it?

issue coin for half a year

“The biggest change in this cycle compared to the previous one is that the coin issuance cycle has been drastically shortened, potentially taking only six months from project initiation to TGE,” said the crypto KOL, Encryption Wuyou, who has 200,000 followers and has been closely following project issuance, in an interview.

In the previous cycle, the standard path for project teams was: first spend a year refining the product, then use half a year to build the community and promote the market, until a certain scale of users and revenue data was formed, only then qualifying to initiate the TGE.

However, by 2025, this logic will be completely reversed. Even star projects listed on top exchanges or teams at the underlying infrastructure level can have their cycle compressed to within a year or even half a year from concept establishment to launch.

Why?

The answer lies in a publicly known secret of the industry: the importance of products and technology has significantly diminished, data can be fabricated, and narratives can be packaged.

“It doesn't matter if there are no users; just create a few million active addresses on the testnet, or go to a niche market and inflate the download numbers and user count on the APP Store, and then find an agency to package the rest. There's no need to keep struggling with the product and technology,” said the encryption industry bluntly.

As for Memecoin, it pushes “speed” to the extreme.

Issuing a coin in the morning, and by the afternoon its market value might exceed tens of millions of dollars; no one cares about its use, only whether it can ignite emotions within a minute.

The cost structure of the project has also changed drastically.

In the previous cycle, a project spent most of its costs on research and development and operations from project initiation to coin issuance.

In this round, the project's costs have suddenly changed dramatically.

The core consists of listing fees and costs related to market makers, including the interests of various intermediaries; secondly, there are marketing expenses such as KOLs, agencies, and media. From project initiation to coin issuance, the actual money spent on products and technology may be less than 20% of the total cost.

Issuing coins has transformed from a long-term accumulation entrepreneurial activity into a quickly replicable industrial assembly line process.

What has happened in the crypto world in just a few years, from shouting Mass Adoption to attention being king?

Collective demystification

If I had to summarize the last crypto market cycle in one word, it would be “disillusionment”.

During the last bull market, everyone once believed that L2, ZK, and privacy computing would reshape the world, believing that “GameFi and SocialFi” could bring blockchain into the mainstream.

But two years have passed, and those once highly anticipated technological narratives and product narratives have fallen one after another. L2 is unused, chain games are still burning money, and social media is still trying to attract new users. Their common characteristic is that there are no real people involved.

Instead, what emerged was the most ironic protagonist, Memecoin. It has no product, no technology, yet it became the most effective narrative.

Retail investors have been disillusioned, and the project parties have also understood the rules of the game.

In the last round, the worst were not those project teams that “did nothing,” but rather those who were serious about their work.

For example, a certain blockchain game project raised tens of millions of dollars, and the team invested all the money into game development, hiring top game designers, purchasing AAA art resources, and building a server cluster. Two years later, the game finally launched, but the market no longer cared, and the token price dropped by 90%. The team had no money left in their accounts and announced their dissolution.

In stark contrast, there is another project that also raised tens of millions of dollars, but the team only hired a few people and outsourced the development of the Demo, spending the rest of the money to buy Bitcoin. Two years later, the Demo is still the Demo, but the asset balance in the account has tripled.

The project team is not only alive but also has money to continue “telling stories”.

The tech faction dies in the long development cycle, the product faction dies at the moment the funding chain breaks, while the speculative faction sees the truth and finds “certainty” in a simpler way: creating chips, capturing attention, and exiting liquidity.

After being harvested by projects that claim to “get things done” time and again, retail investors have long lost their patience and no longer care about so-called fundamentals.

The project team knows that users don't care, and the exchange is aware of everything, the interest pattern is quietly being reshaped.

Winner takes all

Regardless of how the cycles change, exchanges and market makers are always at the top of the food chain.

Exchanges do not care about the rise and fall of coin prices; they care more about trading volume. The profit model in the crypto market has never been about coin prices, but about capturing volatility.

If we were to select the most iconic product innovation this round, Binance Alpha is undoubtedly the watershed.

In the view of practitioner Mike, it is a “genius design,” even comparable to Binance's second business model revolution.

“It kills three birds with one stone and completely revolutionizes the spot listing model,” Mike commented. First, Binance achieved a shortcut over OKX Wallet through Alpha, incorporating the issuance of on-chain assets into its own ecosystem; second, it activated the entire BSC chain, even making top public chains like Solana feel threatened; finally, Alpha delivered a dimensionality reduction attack on secondary and tertiary exchanges, causing their coin listing business to plummet.

The most ingenious thing is that all Alpha projects are essentially nutrients for BNB, and the popularity of each Alpha project translates into demand for BNB. In 2025, the continuous surge in BNB prices reaching new highs is not a coincidence.

But Mike also pointed out the side effects, Binance Alpha has completely streamlined and industrialized the issuance of coins, with a large number of participants not caring at all about what the project is about, just purely brushing points + receiving airdrops + selling.

Mike understands Binance's motives. Binance once tried to launch gaming and social products claiming to have millions of users, but the result was not only poor performance of the tokens but also ridicule and criticism. “Simply use Binance Alpha+Perp to create a standardized token listing model, which BNB holders, BSC, and exchange users can all benefit from.”

The only cost is that this market has gradually abandoned the pursuit of “value” and has fully turned to the competition for “traffic and liquidity.”

Fundamentals are not important; the price itself has become the new fundamental, and market makers who accompany the candlestick charts have become increasingly important.

In the past, what people referred to as market makers were more of “passive market makers,” providing buy and sell quotes on the exchange order book, maintaining market liquidity, and earning the bid-ask spread.

But in 2025, more and more active market makers will begin to take center stage.

They do not wait for the market to change, but instead create the market; the spot market is a tool, while the contract market is their main battlefield.

Market makers accumulate positions at low levels while opening long positions in the futures market. They then continuously pump the spot market to attract retail investors to chase the rise. Once profits are taken on the long positions in the futures market, they suddenly crash the market, leaving retail investors stuck in the spot market and causing futures liquidations. Market makers then harvest with short positions, waiting for prices to drop to the bottom, where they accumulate positions again and start the next round of the cycle.

This pattern, which feeds on volatility, has given rise to many “god coins” during the altcoin bear market, from MYX to the recently popular COAI and AIA. Each “myth” is a precise double kill of both bulls and bears.

But pulling up the market requires funds, so off-market financing has become a new big business during this cycle.

This type of financing is different from traditional leveraged trading; it specifically targets “pump financing” for market makers and project parties. The funding party provides cash, the market makers provide operational capabilities, and the project parties provide token chips, with everyone sharing the profits.

KOL enters the game

Pump and dump is often the best marketing, but it also needs someone to take over.

Especially when the issue coin cycle shortens, project parties need to gain popularity and consensus in a short period of time. In this logic, KOLs and agencies that can gather and manage KOLs become even more important, as they are the “traffic valves” on this issue coin assembly line.

Project parties usually cooperate with KOLs through Agencies. Encryption Wuyi stated that the coin issuance production line in the coin circle is filled with various Agencies that can help project parties generate hype, conduct market outreach, acquire users, carry out promotion, and build consensus.

In his view, “In the current market environment, earning intermediary fees is much easier than doing projects. Doing projects doesn't necessarily guarantee profit, but the money needed to issue coins is essential. Currently, in the market, there are agencies that have come from exchanges and VCs, as well as those that have transitioned from KOLs and media…”

The reason the project parties are willing to pay intermediary fees instead of directly finding KOLs is for efficiency and to mitigate risks.

In the Agency, there are also three types of traffic grading for KOLs.

First is brand traffic. It refers to the different pricing between top KOLs and ordinary KOLs, as top KOLs have established their personal brand, and naturally, their prices are higher.

Second is exposure traffic. It refers to the number of people covered by the content, which is mainly determined by the number of fans of the KOL and the reading volume generated by the posts.

The third is the buying flow. It refers to the quantity of content that has completed transactions or conversions. Usually, project parties will calculate the weights of these three types of flow levels based on their needs, and spending more money does not necessarily lead to better results.

In addition, to form a strong bond with KOLs, the project party has also established a KOL round in the early stage, providing KOLs with certain chips at a lower price to enable them to better complete the “shouting order.”

This coin issuance assembly line has become the “new infrastructure” of the encryption industry.

From the exchange's coin listing review to the market maker's control techniques, from the funding support of over-the-counter financing to the attention capture of agencies, KOLs, and media, every link has been standardized and systematized.

Ironically, the profitability of this system is far greater than the traditional path of making products, accumulating users, and creating value.

Will the crypto market continue like this?

Maybe not. Each cycle is related to its own main storyline, and the next cycle may be very different.

But the form may change, the essence will not.

Since the birth of this market, the competition has been for two things: liquidity and attention.

For everyone involved, the more pressing question is:

Are you looking to be a liquidity maker or a liquidity provider?