Alright, let's talk crypto. Not the pie-in-the-sky, lambo-on-the-moon crypto. The real crypto. The former, the one that makes us all cry digital tears and empty our wallets, is particularly felt here in Southeast Asia. Yet, that’s the reality of the one where more than half of projects released since 2021 are failures. Gone. Ghost tokens haunting the blockchain.

I know, I know, you are all like, “Siti stop being so extra!” Am I though? Or am I simply telling the future as I see it? We need to discuss why this happened, and more importantly, what we can learn from this. After all, let’s face it, a lot of you reading this kind of thing may have gotten burned. Let this serve as a warning, particularly to my fellow Southeast Asians who were led astray by the hype.

Meme Coins Killed the Crypto Star

Meme coins. Ugh. Remember Doge? Shiba Inu? Floki? Man, those were nice for a second, huh? A digital casino that we all mistakenly believed was a one-way ticket to infinite wealth. And platforms like Pump.fun on Solana? Forget about it. A breeding ground for undeliverable promises, instant gratification and even faster rug pulls. Solana, bless its speedy little heart, turned into the absolute meme coin Mecca. The total number of shitcoins created is incomprehensibly high.

It's not just about the coins themselves. It's about the mindset. It’s the same predatory mentality that powers pyramid schemes and get-rich-quick scams that have sunk roots in Southeast Asia for generations. The promise of quick returns. Overconfidence. The fear of missing out (FOMO). The readying to gamble.

I saw it firsthand. Friends sinking their savings into coins with zero utility, based solely on a funny dog picture and promises of astronomical returns. People who wouldn't invest in a nasi lemak stall without doing their research were suddenly throwing thousands of dollars at internet funny money. Madness!

Don't think for a second the big players didn't know this. They profited from it. They fueled the hype. What they did do was pass the buck and shift their risk onto retail investors. This is hardly a cryptocurrency-specific issue. It underscores our vulnerabilities as a society, our utter desperation for financial freedom, and most frightening of all, how easily we can be duped. The drop in meme coin market cap since the all-time high in late December 2024? That was a huge amount of collective hard-earned dollars disappearing into the ether.

Music & Video Tokens Sang the Blues

Okay, so meme coins were a disaster. What about the "serious" projects? Whatever happened to those music and video tokens that were going to displace the entire entertainment industry? Well, let’s just say their trumpeting missed the mark. A really sour note. Around 75% of them are now dead.

Why? Because the competition on the other side, with Web2 behemoths such as Spotify and YouTube, is brutal at best. It is simply not sufficient to just throw a blockchain on something and say that makes it “decentralized. You need real-world utility. You need to solve a problem. You need a viable business model.

Here's where the unexpected connection comes in: these projects failed because they forgot the fundamental principles of business. Looking to open a new pasar malam stall hawking the same goreng pisang as the competition? So charging double the price simply because you slapped on “blockchain” isn’t going to get them to buy. No one's going to buy it!

These projects were further challenged with unique legal complexities, licensing arrangements, and technological challenges. It was hubris to believe that it just took a whitepaper and some new code to upend an entire industry. Wake up! This isn’t a game.

DYOR Or Get Rekt, Seriously

DYOR. Do Your Own Research. You've heard it a million times, right? How many of you really follow through on it? I’m referring to bona fide, empirical research, not a couple of studies jumped up on Reddit.

Think of it like this: before you invest in a local business, you'd check their financials, talk to their customers, and assess their competition, right? You wouldn’t blindly give away your dollars because of a shiny marketing effort. Crypto should be no different!

Remember BitConnect? OneCoin? Ponzi schemes masquerading as crypto projects. They offered crazy high returns and operated on hype and recruitment. In the end, they failed and abandoned millions of innocent people to misery and despair.

  • The Whitepaper: Read it. Understand it. If you can't understand it, that's a red flag.
  • The Problem: Does the project actually solve a real-world problem? Or is it just a solution looking for a problem?
  • The Team: Are they credible? Do they have a track record? Can you verify their identities?
  • Tokenomics: How are the tokens distributed? Is there a fair launch? Or are the insiders holding all the cards?
  • Community & Development: Is the community active and engaged? Is the development team constantly working on the project? A dead GitHub is a major warning sign.

BitConnect & OneCoin Echo Through Time

The surprising linkage here is that these scams are the online version of classic frauds that pre-date the internet. They prey on greed, ignorance, and the desire for the easy buck. They take advantage of the lack of regulation and the facelessness of the internet.

These projects didn’t have a legitimate blockchain, cryptographically verifiable database, or any sort of sustainable business model to speak of. The one thing they were good at was telling the truth.

The hard-won lessons from BitConnect and OneCoin must be carved in granite. If it sounds too good to be true, it really is too good to be true.

Sure, let’s say half of crypto projects are dead. It must be the worst horror story ever written, huh? Wrong. I see it as a cleansing fire. A necessary purge. The good news is that the market is in the process of weeding out the garbage, the scams, and the unsustainable projects.

A Cleansing Fire, Not the End

Like all bubbles, the meme coin craze was a bubble and bubbles eventually burst. The end of these ghost tokens ushers in a new dawn of blockchain projects that make more sense and have real value. Projects with true utility, true teams and true business models.

Overall, the future of crypto in Southeast Asia is a very bright one. What’s more, we have a young, tech-savvy population, a rapidly growing middle class, and acute demand for financial innovation. We must learn from our mistakes. We have to ask tougher questions, be more guarded in our optimism, and do more nuanced research.

The crypto apocalypse wasn’t exactly Armageddon, either. It was a lesson. And hopefully, we'll learn from it. DYOR, my friends. DYOR. Your wallet’s future may just depend on it.

The crypto apocalypse wasn't the end of the world. It was a lesson. And hopefully, we'll learn from it. DYOR, my friends. DYOR. The future of your wallet depends on it.