Retail investors are often wiped out not by the project team’s own actions, but by the big players in the short-selling game. These institutions smash the market with short positions, and once market sentiment FOMO kicks in, retail investors follow suit and buy in, ultimately taking the loss.

It may seem complicated, but it’s actually easy to understand with on-chain tools. Most legitimate startup projects are required to securely lock their tokens into liquidity pools when they are listed on exchanges — this is a standard procedure for exchanges and recommendation agencies. Projects that truly want to do meaningful work also dare not follow Luna’s crazy minting approach, as bad reputation could cost them their lives.

So next time you see a sharp drop in token price, don’t immediately blame the project team. Check if big players are behind the scenes shorting the market. Projects with real use cases and genuine efforts usually have very transparent token unlock mechanisms.