Collective Silence in Asia’s Crypto Morgue
VC On a late March night in 2025, analysts at a Seoul crypto fund scour GitHub with Python scripts. Their mission isn’t to find unicorns but to meet the CEO’s “corpse quota”—projects with at least three unique commits to maintain investment dignity. Outside, neon signs in Gangnam flash “Web3 Innovation Hub,” while inside, dust gathers on untouched coffee cups. This is the new normal: ABCDE Capital’s researcher Lao Bai tweeted that their last investment was in January, with peers describing their work as “funeral services”—burying projects or careers.
Data cuts deeper: Asian crypto VC deals plummeted 73% YoY, median ticket size shrinking from $12M to $1.8M. A major exchange’s investment arm slashed budgets to 17% of 2024 levels, while Memecoins on Pump.fun now rot faster—average lifespan down from 48 to 9 hours. Even bubbles lack the energy to inflate here.
Western Carnival: Pickling Corpses with Idealism
While Asia’s boardrooms stagnate, Silicon Valley parties rage on. a16z closed 23 deals in three months; Paradigm’s modular blockchain bet hit a $700M valuation. A Ukrainian dev’s DAO proposal—tracking artillery shells via blockchain—landed $3M. This surreal contrast mirrors a corpse shared between a morgue and a nightclub: Asians mourn while Westerners rave.Lao Bai’s case epitomizes the absurd: His Pre-seed DeFi project saw Western VCs fighting to overfund its Seed round. Asian peers exchanged baffled glances, as if watching bids on a skeleton. “They’re not investing in the future—they’re cosmetizing corpses,” mocked a Tokyo VC anonymously. Yet JuCoin Research exposed 90% of “hot” project volumes as bot-generated—even the “corpses” are algorithmic ghosts.
Rotting Fruit Economics
“We’re feasting on a corpse called ‘innovation’,” sparked bitter laughter at a Seoul VC meeting. AllianceDAO’s Qiao recalled 2019 optimism on a podcast: “Back then, we believed in Defi Summer. Now ChatGPT writes our narratives.” Crypto’s vital organs now necrotize:Financial viscera hardened: A Layer 2 derivatives protocol hits $3B daily volume, yet its token crashed 92% from private sale. Meme skins shred on Pump.fun’s assembly line—470k tokens minted daily, 99.8% dead in 72 hours. Infrastructure bones deceive: Monad and MegaETH hit 280k TPS, but developer forums see <300 daily users. When innovation becomes a luxury, capital extracts value from rot.
East-West Executioners’ Dialectics
Behind Seoul’s glass walls, analysts designed a “corpse scoring system”: -10 points for GitHub dormancy, -20 for “revolutionary” in whitepapers, instant rejection for team beach photos. In San Francisco, a16z partners sip cold brew while signing checks: “Garage startups? That’s the crypto spirit!”The behavioral rift peaks absurdly: Asian grinders calculate IRR to four decimals, paralyzed by “non-consensus” fears; Western preachers stuff memos with “digital human rights” rhetoric, offsetting losses with idealism; hyena speculators back competing chains because “one will survive the bull run.” Valuation schizophrenia climaxes—Asian VCs crush Pre-seed valuations to $3M, while Westerners splurge $20M on similar projects. Asked why, a Silicon Valley VC smiles: “We’re buying 2030 metaverse bank options.”
Modular Coffins & AI Frankensteins
In narrative drought, modular blockchains became final nails. One project’s whitepaper boasts “plug-and-play consensus layers”—despite a two-node testnet—securing a $1.9B valuation. Grotesquerie thrives:Ondo tokenizes Gaza rubble as “war reconstruction bonds”; projects generate contracts via ChatGPT, NFTs via Stable Diffusion, pitch decks via Sora. Regulators join the farce—Hong Kong’s sandbox lets AI avatars answer inquiries, while Singapore accepts “metaverse financial reports” from BVI shells. A GitHub comment captures it: “We’re building a blockchain theme park—corpses in new costumes.”
Resurrection Rituals & Mummy Valuations
At a NYC speakeasy, ten top funds sign the Neolithic Manifesto, vowing to fund “primitive innovation”—defined as “using ZK-proofs once” or “inventing new acronyms.” In Tokyo, Mitsubishi UFJ launches an “archeology plan” buying 2018 ICO zombie code. The ultimate irony: a dead exchange’s token repackages as RWA “digital artifacts.”When Lao Bai receives a Zoom invite titled “Web5.0 Ecosystem Summit,” he knows the death game persists. In Hong Kong, an AI drafts Crypto Revival: Sprouts from Corpses—a fitting epitaph for this era’s dark humor: where the best business is selling hope to those awaiting resurrection.
Colin Winston
