Over the past couple of days, I went back to look into the pools of a few on-chain play-to-earn games, and the more I looked, the more it felt like that kind of milk tea shop that just opened and is packed with people: the coins are constantly being issued, the yields are constantly being hyped, but the liquidity is actually getting thinner and thinner instead. To put it bluntly, inflation has trained everyone to focus only on how much they can sell today—no one is willing to leave assets in the pool as “long-term users.” You can also tell from the order book: limit orders get more and more slippery, and fills get more and more painful.

What’s even more annoying is that once some small shenanigans around block production / ordering (like MEV) get mixed in, retail traders lose even more patience. The yield you worked hard to mine gets taken by someone else who slips into position first, and your mindset just completely breaks. In any case, when I look at on-chain game economics right now, it’s basically one sentence: the “returns” aren’t profit—they’re a liability. Oh, and I treat complexity as the enemy. As long as I can figure out who’s continuously selling and whether the pool is getting empty, that’s enough for me.