In a certain East Asian country, one in five young people is involved in cryptocurrency trading. This is not a fashion of investment, but a choice driven by reality.

Numbers speak: there are 3.08 million cryptocurrency holders aged 20-39, accounting for nearly a quarter of the total population. Once, this country with less than 1% of the global population managed to control one-fifth of the global Bitcoin online trading volume. What is really behind this?

The answer may be suffocating.

The economic lifeblood is tightly held by a few large corporations—90% of the economic power is concentrated in the hands of five conglomerates, with giants like Samsung and Hyundai monopolizing nearly half of the GDP. For young people, entering these big companies is almost the only way out to change their fate. But what about competition? Hellish. From childhood, spending 16 hours a day studying hard, risking everything, still might not be able to cross this single-plank bridge.

Housing is even the last straw that crushes people. A single property costs the equivalent of more than ten years’ salary for an ordinary person, plus those bizarre "full-tax housing" policies, making even renting a luxury. Many can only curl up in a few square meters of small space, seeing no way out.

At this moment, cryptocurrency appeared. With low barriers to entry and high volatility, it attracted countless desperate people with the illusion of "getting rich overnight." Some borrowed money from high-interest lenders, some used their parents’ retirement homes as collateral, and some poured every penny earned from part-time jobs into it. None of this is out of greed, but the last struggle when cornered.

To put it simply, the booming crypto trading market reflects not investment frenzy, but the plight of an entire young generation. When social mobility becomes almost impossible, when effort itself seems cheap, cryptocurrency becomes the bubble that most resembles hope. This is a social issue and an era issue.