Market pace is now ridiculously fast, with hot topics taking turns to dominate. The lifeline of a project may only last a few weeks or even days. Everyone is watching for the "next trend," but few stop to ask: besides hype and speculation, what else does this have? It was only after stepping through countless pitfalls that I truly changed my perspective on cryptocurrencies.

Taking privacy-focused projects as an example, what attracts me is never the price increase but whether their positioning is sufficiently pragmatic. Privacy itself is not a new concept, but most projects either go to extremes with anonymous routes that attract regulatory crackdown or are left with only slogans. The real challenge in this space is: how to find a balance between privacy protection and compliant regulation?

The real financial system will never operate as a black box. Institutions need audits, regulators require verifiability, companies need transparency disclosures, but ordinary users also don’t want every transaction to be visible to the world. This contradiction leads some projects to ignore it, while others try to find a middle ground. The latter may not seem glamorous or generate short-term hot topics, but they have more reasons to survive.

Gradually, I no longer believe in the "get-rich-quick myth," but instead care about the necessity of a project’s existence. True value isn’t about climbing the hot list but whether it survives through real application rather than storytelling. These projects may not give you quick wealth dreams, but at least they are worth serious consideration.