Coin Issuing Factory: Who is "sucking blood" on the production line?

Author: Liam, Deep Tide TechFlow

In 2025, the productivity revolution in the cryptocurrency market will not be AI, but rather token issuance.

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 exceeded 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 one can make money simply by issuing tokens has been debunked, it cannot diminish the determination of project teams to launch tokens one after another. This token issuance assembly line 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 profits, but every gear in the factory has found its own profit model.

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

half-year token distribution

“The biggest change in this cycle compared to the previous one is that the token issuance cycle has been extremely compressed, possibly taking only six months from project initiation to TGE,” said the cryptocurrency KOL Crypto Fearless, who has 200,000 fans and has been closely following project issuances, in an interview.

In the previous cycle, the standard path for the project party 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 is formed, before being qualified to initiate the TGE.

However, by 2025, this logic will be completely reversed. Even star projects listed on top exchanges or teams at the foundational infrastructure level can have their timelines compressed to within a year or even six months from the concept establishment to going live.

Why?

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

“It doesn't matter if there are no users. We can create millions of active addresses on the testnet, or go to a niche market and inflate the download numbers and user count of the APP Store. After that, we can find an agency to package it. There's no need to stubbornly focus on product and technology,” said Crypto Fearlessly.

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

In the morning, a coin can be sent, and by the afternoon, its market value may exceed tens of millions of dollars. No one cares about its use; they only look at whether it can ignite emotions within a minute.

The cost structure of the project has also changed completely.

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

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

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

The issuance of tokens has transformed from a long-term accumulation entrepreneurial activity into a replicable industrial assembly line process.

From loudly proclaiming Mass Adoption to the reign of attention, what exactly has happened in the crypto world in just a few short years?

collective disenchantment

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

During the previous bull market, everyone believed that L2, ZK, and privacy computing would reshape the world, and 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 networks are still trying to attract new users. Their common characteristic is that there are hardly any real people involved.

What replaces it, however, is the most ironically significant protagonist, Memecoin. It has no product and no technology, yet it has become the most effective narrative.

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

In the last round, the ones who suffered the most were not those project teams that “did nothing,” but rather those who worked hard.

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 server clusters. Two years later, the game was finally launched, but the market no longer cared, the token price plummeted by 90%, and the team announced its dissolution due to lack of funds.

In stark contrast, there is another project that also raised over ten million dollars, but the team only hired a few people and outsourced the development of the Demo, using the remaining funds to buy Bitcoin. Two years later, the Demo is still a Demo, but the asset balance 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 speculators see the truth and find “certainty” in a simpler way: creating chips, capturing attention, and exiting liquidity.

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

The project party knows that users do not care, and the exchange knows all of this as well; the利益格局 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 currency prices; they care more about trading volume. The profit model in the cryptocurrency world has never been about currency prices, but about capturing volatility.

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

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

“It kills three birds with one stone, completely revolutionizing the model of spot listings,” Mike commented. Firstly, Binance achieved a breakthrough over OKX Wallet through Alpha, incorporating on-chain asset issuance into its own ecosystem; secondly, it activated the entire BSC chain, even posing a threat to leading public chains like Solana; finally, Alpha inflicted a dimensionality reduction strike on second and third-tier exchanges, causing their token listing business to plummet.

The most exquisite part is that all Alpha projects essentially serve as nourishment for BNB, and the popularity of each Alpha project translates into demand for BNB. In 2025, the continuous surge in BNB's price to new highs is not a coincidence.

But Mike also pointed out the side effects. Binance Alpha has completely streamlined and industrialized the listing process, with many participants not caring at all about what the project is about, simply focusing on accumulating points + claiming airdrops + selling.

Mike understands Binance's motivation. Binance once attempted to launch gaming and social products that claimed to have millions of users, but the tokens not only performed poorly but were also ridiculed and criticized. “Simply use Binance Alpha+Perp to create a standardized 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 fully shifted towards the competition for “traffic and liquidity.”

Fundamentals are not important; the price itself has become the new fundamental. Therefore, market makers working alongside K-lines are becoming increasingly important.

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

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

They do not wait for the market trends, but rather create them. The spot market is a tool, while the futures market is their main battlefield.

Market makers accumulate positions at low levels while opening long positions in the futures market, then continuously pump prices in the spot market to attract retail investors to chase the rise. The long positions in the futures market take profits, then suddenly crash the market, leaving retail investors trapped in the spot market, and futures positions get liquidated. The market makers then use short positions to harvest profits, and when the price drops to the bottom, they accumulate again to start the next cycle.

This volatility-feeding model has given rise to numerous meme coins during the bear market, from MYX to the recently popular COAI and AIA, each “myth” being a precise double kill for both bulls and bears.

But raising prices requires capital, so off-market financing has become a new big business in this cycle.

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

KOL enters the game

Pumping is often the best marketing, but it also requires someone to take over.

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

Project parties usually cooperate with KOLs through agencies. Crypto Wuyou claims that the token issuance pipeline in the crypto space is filled with various agencies that can help project parties generate hype, market, acquire users, promote, and build consensus.

In his view, “in the current market environment, earning intermediary fees is much easier than working on projects. Projects do not always guarantee profits, but the money needed to issue tokens is a must. Currently, there are agencies in the market that have come from exchanges, VCs, and those that have transitioned from KOLs and media…”

The reason the project party is willing to pay a brokerage fee instead of directly seeking 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. This refers to the different pricing between top KOLs and ordinary KOLs, as top KOLs have already established their personal brands, which naturally results in higher prices.

The second is exposure traffic. This 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. This 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, in order to form a strong binding with KOLs, the project team has also established a KOL round in the early stages, providing KOLs with a certain amount of chips at a lower price to enable them to better complete the “call orders.”

This coin issuance pipeline has become the “new infrastructure” of the cryptocurrency industry.

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

Ironically, the profit-making efficiency of this system is far higher than the traditional path of creating products - accumulating users - and generating value.

Will the cryptocurrency 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.

Because since the inception of this market, the contention has been for two things: liquidity and attention.

For everyone involved, the more pressing issue to consider is:

Do you want to be someone who creates liquidity or someone who provides liquidity?