When did retail investors truly start becoming “bag holders”?

Actually, it didn’t happen suddenly in a certain year. Instead, pricing power gradually shifted from the public market to the fundraising stage.

The earliest ones—like that E group—had an ICO price of $0.31, and the secondary market was only a little above $0.4. There was almost no difference between primary and secondary, so even if you missed the earliest round, your cost still wasn’t too far apart, and the full upside was left to the market. By 2018–2020—for example, SOL—there started to be a clear cost tiering: the seed round was $0.04, and the lowest in the secondary market was $0.5. That’s already a tenfold difference. The problem was that at the time, the narrative and growth hadn’t been exhausted. The market was still willing to keep raising valuations, so even though retail investors had to enter at a higher price, they could still catch the big rally that came later.

The real change happened after 2020. It wasn’t that projects got worse—the game changed. There were more funding rounds, valuations were continuously pushed forward, and prices were effectively “designed” before listing. Take OP and STRK, for example. In essence, it’s no longer about discovering the price through listing; it’s about taking a market to cash out at pre-set prices. During the private funding stage, FDV kept getting inflated. At the moment of listing, what was given to the secondary market wasn’t room for growth—it was an already overdrawn valuation. The up-and-down moves you see are just volatility. The real profits had already been split long before you could see them.

So the structure changed completely: in the past, primary was cheaper and secondary helped grow the whole “cake.” Now, primary sets the price, and secondary’s job is to provide liquidity. After that, low circulation and high FDV became the default. That makes it easier to push prices higher and then distribute (“dump”) into exit demand. Airdrops turned into a calming mechanism, while TGE increasingly looks like a liquidity release point rather than a starting point.

So the issue isn’t that retail investors became weaker. It’s that the upside is no longer left in the public market. If you still use the old logic of “hold on and wait for the bull market” to play this new structure, you’ll most likely end up exhausting yourself at high valuations. People who can still make money now are, in essence, doing something different: watching the timing, tracking unlocks, finding liquidity windows—deciding when to exit before deciding when to enter. In other words, this market has shifted from a contest of choosing ability to a contest of who understands this allocation game better.