Who buys the long tail of cryptocurrencies?

Question

I can understand investing in BTC, ETH, maybe even putting a few dollars in DOGE to see what happens. Maybe you use Uniswap and Aave, that's cool. I follow crypto pretty closely, but I just can't wrap my head around the long tail of crypto.1. Every week there is a [new exploit](https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/) on some protocol I've never heard of - $21M drained from Gala games? Investor loses $1.6M in an attack on the Normie token? These are real realized dollar values, not just paper gains. Who on earth, who has managed to accumulate >$1.6M in wealth, would spend it on a random unaudited crypto token - and how does that happen so often?2. Almost every long-tail crypto token has a beyond absurd insider allocation. Look at [Worldcoin for example](https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/worldcoin), only 2.3% of the total supply of that token is circulating. That means if you buy WLD today you're going to be diluted 45X. It makes no rational sense as an investment. How is it possible that it's reached a $45B market cap?I can click to page 5 of CoinGecko and pick any random token - let's see, Stargate Finance, "a fully composable liquidity transport protocol that lives at the heart of Omnichain DeFi." $500M valuation, only 20% of supply circulating, protocol with $350M value locked...I'm asking you, where does this money come from? I just can't picture the type of investor throwing millions or tens of millions of dollars at these obscure tokens.I know some of you will argue that these are just inflated values / "paper gains" with no real liquidity and fake trading volume - and while that may be partly or mostly true, the reality is there are tens of millions of dollars of liquidity on any of these. The creator of that last token I mentioned raised $120M from a16z, who must be expecting to make their money back somehow. Who does a16z expect to sell those tokens to? Is it truly just an incestuous cycle of crypto funds that expect to sell their tokens to the next crypto fund at an absurd valuation? Or do they somehow expect to get hundreds of millions of retail dollars to buy this token?

GianFabien · Accepted Answer

I think you hit the nail on the head with: "incestuous cycle of crypto funds" which outside of crypto-world would be called a Ponzi Scheme. I suspect that if suddenly a large number of investors were to sell their holdings for USD, then the value of those tokens would plummet.BTW $120M for a16z is a small gamble. Probably a hedged position in their portfolio.

freddref · Answer

I would guess there's a sizable chunk of people who but these coins are not investors as such.
The long tail of people buy the long tail of coins.
I bought coins when I first discovered them, driven by curiosity mostly.

SavageBeast · Answer

Im sitting back with a bag of popcorn here waiting for replies because I have always wondered the same thing. Just at the Some Random Guy level I used to dabble in some "up and coming" coins, just for the .001% chance one of them becomes a big deal. Where else can you risk turning $100 into $1M right? In retrospect I could have spent $1,500 on literally anything else and done better but at the time I knew idiots who went crazy long on a few at-the-time silly tokens and got fairly rich. I wasn't about to let a handful of idiots out-idiot me and it was a fun gamble, not unlike a sports bet I think.

Who buys the long tail of cryptocurrencies?

I would guess there's a sizable chunk of people who but these coins are not investors as such.The long tail of people buy the long tail of coins.I bought coins when I first discovered them, driven by curiosity mostly.

I would guess there's a sizable chunk of people who but these coins are not investors as such.
The long tail of people buy the long tail of coins.
I bought coins when I first discovered them, driven by curiosity mostly.