#机构投资者入场 Seeing Cantor Fitzgerald's forecast, the first thought that flashed through my mind was—I've heard this logic too many times before.

The bear markets of 2018 and the crash of 2022, each downward cycle was followed by analysts jumping out to cite the "four-year historical cycle," then providing a seemingly professional bottom price. But the truly interesting part isn't their price predictions, it's that one sentence in this report—"institutional participants are shaping the market landscape," not retail investors.

This is the core change.

I've experienced the 2015-2017 cycle, witnessed the madness of 2020-2021, and saw the despair at the end of 2022. The composition of participants in each cycle has been changing. Early on, it was technical believers and gamblers, then retail FOMO, followed by hedge funds sensing opportunity. Now, it's genuine institutional forces entering—their goal isn't short-term gains, but treating crypto assets as part of asset allocation.

Knoblauch mentioned that the gap between token prices and "underlying real progress" is widening, which precisely indicates a phenomenon: market sentiment-driven momentum is weakening, while fundamentals are gaining influence. Progress in DeFi, asset tokenization, and infrastructure is more meaningful to long-term participants than short-term price fluctuations.

So, a "crypto winter" may come, and price pressure is normal, but this time, the targets of liquidation are completely different. Retail investors have been almost eliminated in previous rounds, and institutional investors' risk management systems operate under a different logic. They won't panic and flee just because prices drop; instead, they might continue to deploy at low levels.

History tells us that every "endgame" predicted often becomes the starting point for the next growth cycle.