It's been a month since I last checked the market, and when I reopened the $FIL data, I was a bit confused. The community is full of lamentations, and the numbers are even more heartbreaking—active miners are down to only 1,063, and the total effective network hash rate has fallen below 20 EiB.

What's the most frightening thing? Some people in the circle are starting to speculate whether the project team is also trying to play the same tricks as "Luna's last night before explosion." Even those once loyal fans and traders who used to shout buy signals are now cursing and changing their tune. This is not a "king's return," but rather a "ruins encounter," to put it plainly.

Watching FIL gradually collapse step by step, I actually don't have much desire to buy the dip; instead, I feel more relieved. I'm glad I decisively withdrew from projects that overly rely on narratives, have strong cyclical patterns, or whose ecological health is questionable, when the market sentiment turned sour. I turned my investments toward some more solid and sustainable tracks.

Recently, I've been looking into some DeFi infrastructure projects. These kinds of projects don't talk about "decentralized storage changing the world"—those big topics that take ten years to verify. Instead, they focus on solving a tangible, immediate pain point: how to ensure your money can pursue yields while protecting your principal and maintaining flexibility.

This is the key difference. When miners of storage tokens are fleeing and hash rates are collapsing, what are truly promising projects doing? They are building underlying infrastructure that makes assets safer and more efficient to appreciate. That is the essence of surviving bull and bear markets.

From "storytelling is king" to "utility is king," this is the clearest paradigm shift in this market cycle. History will tell us what the fate of those older infrastructure projects that can only tell stories will be.