Why will the infrastructure track in 2025 become a slaughterhouse for retail investors? Because in the business plans of top-tier projects, there has never been a section on 'profit from relying on technology services.' When tokens are transformed from equity certificates into the only source of income, this industry is destined to be a capital game of passing the buck. This article will deeply analyze the collapse of this business model and explore how 'negative teaching materials' like Hyperliquid are reshaping the market.
Introduction: The ruins of Ukraine and the calculations of Fujian people
In the business world, the Fujian business group ("Min merchants") is known for its keen intuition: where there is a price difference, there is business; where there is chaos, there is arbitrage. Even in the war-torn Ukraine, Fujian people are seeking opportunities to gain wealth in danger.
Traditional Fujian merchants understand a principle: in a gold rush, the most certain path to wealth is not speculative gold mining but providing the necessary production tools (shovels) and logistical services to speculators.
From 2017 to 2021, the crypto industry faithfully practiced this creed. Exchanges, mining machine vendors, and public chains made a fortune by charging Gas fees and transaction fees. However, entering the 2023-2025 cycle, as technical upgrades like EIP-4844 led to Gas fees approaching zero, and with severe oversupply of L2 infrastructure, "selling shovels" as a business collapsed in logic.
Faced with the disappearance of core business profit margins, the industry has turned to a distorted "global arbitrage" model: project teams no longer focus on selling technical services to users but instead sell "financialized rights of infrastructure" (tokens) as core commodities to retail investors.
Traditional "Fujian merchants" would shout "Ji lat" upon seeing this scene. Because this time, the shovels are free, but the ones buying the shovels have become the product.
Chapter 1: The Mutation of Business Models — From 'Selling Services' to 'Selling Air'
1.1 Technical victory, business suicide
In 2025, Ethereum's scalability roadmap achieved significant technical victories. The implementation of EIP-4844 reduced the costs for L2 to submit data to L1 by over 90%.
From a technical perspective, this is for the benefit of users; but from a business perspective, this destroys L2's profit margins. In the past, L2 was like a second landlord flipping land for profit; now, the land has become worthless. According to data from 1kx and Token Terminal, although the trading volume increased by 2.7 times in the first half of 2025, the total revenue from Gas fees across the network decreased by 86%.
1.2 The shattering of income illusions
ZkSync Era provided a brutal sample. Before the token generation event (TGE) in June 2024, its network's daily income peaked at over 740,000 USD. On the surface, this looks like a thriving "shovel store."
However, when the airdrop landed, daily income instantly plummeted to 6,800 USD, a drop of 99%. This reveals an awkward truth: no one is using this shovel to mine gold; everyone buys shovels just to draw a possible winning lottery ticket (airdrop).
Chapter 2: The Internal Structure of the Harvesting Machine — "Low Circulation, High FDV"
Since "toll fees" can no longer make money, project teams and VCs must find new paths. Thus, a new business model based on financial alchemy was born: producing tokens and then selling them.
2.1 The fracture of valuation
To make this business viable, the market invented a play involving "low circulation, high fully diluted valuation (FDV)."
Starknet (STRK) had a FDV of over 20 billion USD at the beginning of 2024.
However, its actual annual revenue was only tens of millions of USD. This means its price-to-sales ratio (P/S Ratio) was as high as 500-700 times. In comparison, the true shovel king in the AI field, NVIDIA, typically has a P/S Ratio of only 30-40 times.
2.2 Predatory market maker collusion
If tokens are commodities, then market makers (MM) are distributors. But in this cycle, distribution has turned into predation.
"Borrowing coins + call options" model has become the industry standard:
Project teams lend a large number of tokens to MM.
Give MM a call option (the exercise price is usually higher than the current price).
Consequence: MM can only profit by creating extreme volatility, pushing the price above the exercise price, and dumping the goods in hand to retail investors.
The Movement Labs scandal that erupted in 2025 completely tore off the veil: the contract explicitly stated the terms, incentivizing market makers to push the FDV to 5 billion USD to share profits. The so-called "market cap management" is essentially just "pump and dump" written into a legal contract.
Chapter 3: The Revenge of Cautionary Tales — The Insights of Hyperliquid
In a wasteland of L2 and the infamy of VC coins, Hyperliquid stands out as an "outlier," delivering a resounding slap to the market.
It is not just a successful project but also a mirror that reveals the hypocrisy of traditional "king-level" projects.
3.1 Origins: Aristocracy vs. grassroots
Starknet/ZkSync: Born with a golden spoon, top VCs raised hundreds of millions in financing. To maintain high valuations, they must continuously paint a pie in the sky and build complex ecological narratives.
Hyperliquid: Community-driven, without top VC's exorbitant financing. It does not make generic "shovels"; it only does one thing: to make on-chain perpetual contract trading smoother, a dedicated road (L1) was built.
3.2 Model: Ponzi subsidies vs. real earnings
This is the most essential difference between the two.
Infrastructure logic: Build a highway (L2), only to find no cars running. Thus, print money (tokens) to subsidize drivers. Drivers take the money and run, leaving the road empty.
Application chain logic (Hyperliquid): The casino (DEX) business here is too hot, and the existing road is congested. So a dedicated road was built. It does not earn money by charging tolls (Gas); it makes money by taking a cut from the casino (transaction fees).
3.3 Result: The reality of valuation
When you buy $STRK, you are buying 90% of the unlocked selling pressure and a network that no one would use without subsidies. However, during 2024-2025, Hyperliquid's generated real protocol fees often exceeded those of most general-purpose L2s. Its valuation is not determined by VC's PPT but supported by real cash flow (PE Ratio).
Chapter 4: Conclusion — The merchants' festival has ended
The cryptocurrency market from 2023 to 2025 staged a grand drama of primitive capital accumulation disguised as "technological innovation."
If we re-examine this cycle through the eyes of Fujian businessmen, we will see the following scene: this group of people (project teams + VCs) initially claimed they would build houses in the new district, but they actually don't care whether the houses are livable. What they are truly doing is:
Putting up a sign on that land and printing a bunch of "brick tickets" (tokens).
Bringing in Wall Street big shots (VCs) to stand on stage, claiming that brick tickets can be exchanged for gold in the future.
Finally, using the contract mechanism to smash those who want to short brick tickets, seizing the opportunity to exchange the worthless paper in hand for retail investors' USDT.
This is why it is said that "listing is to dump." Because in their business plans, there has never been an item "profit through technical services."
But the rise of Hyperliquid and Pump.fun marks the end of this model. The market is beginning to awaken: it's not that the altcoins have no bull market, but the bull market cannot accommodate altcoins without cash flow.
In 2025, the game of "selling air" for Fujian merchants came to an end; the era of "selling products" for BUIDL may just be beginning.
