For a market supposedly in a bull run, it doesn’t feel like one. Sure, Bitcoin may have set a couple of record highs this cycle, but the rallies have been uneventfully yawn-inducing, and the corrections have been savage. Altcoins are down 90% or more. Retail has vanished. And even the diehards are wondering if this so-called bull cycle deserves the name at all.

This is, by many accounts, the hardest bull market crypto has ever seen. Bitcoin has doubled since its 2023 lows, but the soul of the market feels hollowed out. What happened? Altcoin trader “Crypto Birb” breaks it down into three main reasons.

The institutions sucked the air out of the room

Wall Street didn’t just arrive this cycle; it moved in and redecorated. BlackRock, Fidelity, and Goldman didn’t come to speculate; they came to own infrastructure, custody networks, and tokenized real-world assets. Institutional adoption is the tidy headline, but what it really means is extraction at scale. They’re not playing memecoins or hunting airdrops. They bought the pipes, liquidity rails, and compliance corridors that everyone else has to rent.

As Telcoin Magazine and Fortune both note, institutional adoption in early 2025 was “foundational, not speculative.” That’s great for Bitcoin, terrible for the culture. As Crypto Birb comments:

“Smart money took what’s valuable – good on them.”

Memecoins and the collapse of meaning

If the institutions professionalized the space, memecoins disfigured it. What began as satire became the dominant narrative of 2024 and 2025. Every week brought a new “community” token, a new animal, a new political in-joke, and a new wave of burned holders.

Memecoins turned crypto into a casino with no exit doors. Token after token pumped on virality alone, then cratered. Even industry veterans who should’ve known b

Go to Source to See Full Article
Author: Christina Comben