Did you know that the majority, almost every project, especially L1s/L2s - are not made by real teams this cycle? They are fake teams installed by incubators 🥶 Zero passion, zero desire to make things work. Just first month pump&dump for the chosen maliciously unlocked holders and foundation - and then slow rug by paying to random hired members. Here is how this works: 1. A VC incubator (or a founder-incubator like Neel Salami with VC connections, many such cases) sees a narrative. They make a pitch deck and install a couple of initial team members to make it look real; 3. A silly VC agrees to lead and/or be part of the grift and/or the initial grifters just semi-lie about soft commits to get a lead. This depends on the market fomo and the grifters’ reputation. This is the hardest step. 4. As the round gets confirmed, they hire a devshop to make ui/docs/app and some more real team members. Usually the working team has 0 clue about the grifting plans. See Movement. 5. Raise more, bump social metrics… then either the initial parties start OTCing before TGE and/or they get a piece of the foundation selling at TGE (since investors should be locked technically). The initial grifters share parts of the foundation sales. 6. After this, the token remains as a free option to bull market: the project lives, some updates continue, maybe even something happens with new hired real devs figuring out some innovative things - but usually unlikely as there is no “soul”. This was kinda done last cycle too, but the number of such projects was much much lower. This cycle nothing is investable because the majority of stuff is done this way. And it keeps happening. In fact, last cycle it was much less grifty. There were more “advisors” around (some were useful, some not) but founders were real and actually had control over such parties. Advisors had unlocks changed, weren’t liquid on day 1, etc. This cycle, public founders and team are often totally clueless in such setups and have no control over anything. The root causes and issues of capital formation in crypto were discussed by many smarter people on twitter already (@Tiza4ThePeople, @0xShual, @fede_intern, @VannaCharmer, @Fiskantes, @cobie - read there). But an undeniable fact is: lack of new talent entering into the space. What we see around are the same established cabal circles trying to milk more with recycled “new” ideas. PS: not commenting on morph per se, but the article fits the general context.