Coin Issuance Factory: Who is "sucking blood" on the assembly line?

Author: Liam, TechFlow

Reprint: White55, Mars Finance

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

Dune data shows that in March 2021, there were about 350,000 types of tokens across the network; this rose to 4 million a year later; by spring 2025, this number has 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 almost every day.

Although the myth that launching tokens can make money has been shattered, it cannot withstand the determination of project teams who want to issue tokens one after another. This token 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 profits, but every gear in the factory has found its own profit model.

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

Half-year token issuance

“The biggest change in this cycle compared to the last cycle is that the token issuance period has been drastically compressed, from project initiation to TGE, which may only take half a year,” said the cryptocurrency KOL Crypto Fearless, who has 200,000 fans and has been following project launches for a long time, in an interview.

In the previous cycle, the standard path for the project team was to spend a year refining the product, then use half a year to build the community and promote the market, until they formed a certain scale of users and revenue data, before they qualified to initiate the TGE.

But by 2025, this logic will be completely reversed. Even star projects that are listed on top exchanges or teams at the infrastructure level can have their cycles compressed to within a year or even six months from concept inception to launch.

Why?

The answer lies in an industry’s open secret: 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; 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, then find an agency to package everything else. There's no need to stubbornly grind on the product and technology,” said the bold crypto expert.

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

Send a coin in the morning, and by the afternoon its market value may exceed tens of millions of dollars. Nobody cares about their use; they only look at whether it can ignite emotions within a minute.

The cost structure of the project has also been completely changed.

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

In this round, the project's costs have 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 listing, the actual money spent on products and technology may be less than 20% of the total cost.

Token issuance has transformed from a long-term accumulation entrepreneurial activity into a quickly replicable industrialized assembly line process.

What exactly has happened in the cryptocurrency circle in just a few years, from shouting “Mass Adoption” to the attention being king?

Collective Disenchantment

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

In 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 not being used, blockchain games are still burning money, and social platforms are still trying to attract new users. Their common characteristic is that there are hardly any real users.

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

Retail investors have been demystified, and the project team has also understood the rules of the game.

In the last round, the worst were not the projects that “did nothing,” but rather those that worked seriously.

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 finally launched, but the market no longer cared, and the token price plummeted 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, where the team only hired a few people and outsourced the development of the Demo, using all 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 being harvested by projects that “get things done” time and time again, retail investors have long lost their patience and no longer care about the so-called fundamentals.

The project team knows that users do not care, the exchange also knows all of this, and the利益格局 is quietly being reshaped.

Winner takes all

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

Exchanges do not care about the price fluctuations of coins; they care more about trading volume. The profit model in the cryptocurrency space has never been about coin prices, but rather about capturing volatility.

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

In the eyes 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 model of spot listings,” Mike commented. First, Binance achieved a shortcut over OKX Wallet through Alpha, incorporating on-chain asset issuance into its own ecosystem; second, it activated the entire BSC chain, even making leading public chains like Solana feel threatened; finally, Alpha delivered a dimensionality reduction strike on second and third-tier exchanges, causing their token listing business to plummet.

The most ingenious part is that all Alpha projects are essentially the nourishment for BNB, and the popularity of each Alpha project translates into demand for BNB. In 2025, the continuous surge in BNB prices 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, just purely grinding for points + claiming airdrops + selling.

Mike understands Binance's motivations; Binance once tried to launch game and social products claiming to have millions of users, but the results were not only poor token performance but also ridicule and criticism. “Simply use Binance Alpha + Perp to create a standardized listing model, allowing BNB holders, BSC, and exchange users to benefit.”

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

The fundamentals are not important; the price itself has become the new fundamental, making market makers who work with candlesticks increasingly important.

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

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

They do not wait for market trends; instead, they 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, they continuously pump the spot market to attract retail investors to chase the rise. Profits are taken on long positions in the futures market, followed by a sudden crash, leaving retail investors trapped in the spot market and causing liquidations in the futures market. Market makers then use short positions to harvest profits, waiting for prices to drop to the bottom before accumulating positions again, starting the next cycle.

This volatility-driven model has spawned many “god coins” in the bear market, from MYX to the recently popular COAI and AIA. Each “myth” is a precise double kill for both bulls and bears.

However, raising the market requires funds, 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 “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 Entry

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

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

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

In his view, “In the current market environment, earning a commission is much easier than working on projects. Projects don't necessarily guarantee profit, but the money needed to issue tokens 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 why 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. This refers to the different pricing between top KOLs and ordinary KOLs, as top KOLs have already established their personal brands, so their prices are naturally higher.

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.

Third is the volume of buy orders. This refers to the quantity of content that has completed transactions or conversions. Usually, project parties will calculate the weight of these three levels of traffic based on their needs, and spending more money does not necessarily yield better results.

In addition, to form a strong binding with KOLs, the project party has established a KOL round in the early stages, offering KOLs a certain amount of chips at a lower price, so that KOLs can better complete the “shouting orders.”

This token issuance assembly line has become the “new infrastructure” of the cryptocurrency industry.

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

Ironically, the efficiency of making money in this system is much higher than the traditional path of developing products - accumulating users - creating value.

Will the cryptocurrency market continue like this?

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

But the form may change, the essence will not.

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

For everyone involved, the more pressing question is:

Do you want to be the one who creates liquidity or the one who provides liquidity?