Author: danny , Pundi AI
Throughout the three centuries of financial markets, a repeatedly verified pattern has emerged: bull markets are never ignited by a particular narrative, but rather by upgrades in trading mechanisms. Whether it’s ICOs, perpetual contracts, AMMs, DeFi, or NFTs… they all involve mechanisms driving competition, and competition leading to the circulation of funds. It is the upgrading of mechanisms that brings prosperity.
Looking back at the starting point of each major market trend, you’ll find that what they have in common is not “the emergence of a good story,” but rather “market participants suddenly gaining a new way of playing the game.”
What ignites the next boom is never the narrative, but the evolution of each trading mechanism.
This pattern has never failed, from Wall Street to Binance, from spot to futures, from DeFi Summer to Hyperliquid.
You can short it—that is, equal rights to short sell are the key to the next altcoin bull market.
I. In 1609, a Dutch merchant changed the history of finance.
Amsterdam, 1609.
The Dutch East India Company (VOC) was the world’s largest publicly traded company at the time, monopolizing the Asian spice trade, and its stock price only went up. Everyone was buying, and everyone was making money. The market only had one direction—up.
Then a businessman named Isaac le Maire did something that everyone thought was crazy at the time: he borrowed VOC stock, sold it, and bet that it would fall.
This is the first recorded short-selling transaction in human history.
The Dutch government was furious. Parliament considered it a malicious attack on a pillar of the national economy and passed legislation banning short selling. Le Maire was publicly condemned. But the story didn’t end there—despite repeated bans, short selling never truly disappeared in Amsterdam. Market participants discovered an undeniable fact: with short selling, prices became more realistic. Overvalued stocks could no longer sustain their false prosperity indefinitely.
Four hundred years later, the crypto market is repeating the same script. In a market teeming with thousands of altcoins, there is only buying, no shorting. Prices reflect only half of the optimism, while pessimistic voices are forcibly silenced. Every market cycle is the same: FOMO drives prices up, the bubble bursts, leaving a mess, and then the next narrative begins.
But history has shown us that the introduction of short-selling rights is not the end of the market, but rather the beginning of it.
II. Two Hundred Years of Wall Street: How Short Selling Transformed from “Enemy of the Nation” to “Cornerstone of the Market”
1792-1840s: The Wilderness Era – A Primitive Market Where Only Buying Was Possible.
On May 17, 1792, 24 brokers signed the Buttonwood Agreement under a sycamore tree on Wall Street, agreeing to trade stocks among themselves. This was the precursor to the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
The market back then was similar to today’s altcoin market: you could only buy, hold, wait for dividends, and wait for the New Year. There was no leverage, no short selling, and no standardized settlement process. The average daily trading volume was probably less than $500,000, with only a few dozen participants. The market was extremely small because there was so little that could be done.
Price fluctuations are entirely driven by bullish sentiment. Good news arrives, everyone buys, and prices soar. Bad news arrives, everyone wants to sell, but because the market is too shallow, they can’t sell, and prices crash. No short sellers cover their positions during the decline, so the market lacks natural support, and the bottom depends entirely on when the last bull gives up.
Doesn’t this resemble the altcoin market of 2024-2025, characterized by memes, high FDV, and low float?
1850s-1860s: Short selling takes center stage – fear and prosperity arrive simultaneously.
In the 1830s and 1840s, a trader named Jacob Little made a fortune by short selling and was known as “Wall Street’s first big short seller.” However, short selling truly became a mainstream weapon in the decade before and after the Civil War.
Daniel Drew, Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt—these names defined Wall Street in that era. They waged a series of epic battles between bulls and bears over railroad stocks: Drew shorted Erie Railroad, while Gould and Fisk teamed up to attack Vanderbilt’s long positions. These battles were bloody, chaotic, and rife with fraud, but the objective result was that short selling transformed from a secret weapon of a few into a standard tool on Wall Street.
The social reaction was strikingly similar to that in Holland in 1609. Members of parliament denounced short sellers as “enemies of the state,” and newspapers said they were “profiting from the misfortunes of others.” Public fear of short selling has remained virtually unchanged for four centuries.
But the market’s response was just as positive and enthusiastic as it was four hundred years ago: 📷
Every short-selling transaction creates a sell order, but also inevitably creates a buy order in the future (short covering). Increased trading volume narrows price spreads, attracting more participants. Wall Street transforms from a small circle of a few dozen people into a true capital market.
The Great Crash of 1929 → The Uptick Rule of 1938: the peak of fear and the turning point .
In October 1929, Wall Street crashed. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted by nearly 90% in two years. Public anger needed an outlet, and short sellers became the most convenient target—although the real culprits were the rampant leverage bubble and the systemic collapse of the banking system.
In 1934, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was established. Short selling once again faced the danger of being completely banned. But the SEC made a historic choice: in 1938, it did not ban short selling, but instead introduced the “uptick rule” (Rule 10a-1)—short selling could only be executed when the stock price was rising, preventing short sellers from continuously dumping shares.
The significance of this choice cannot be overstated. It established a principle that continues to this day: short selling should not be eliminated, but regulated. Rules are not the enemy of short selling; rules are the prerequisite for the legitimacy of short selling.
With rules in place, short selling is no longer a gray area. Institutional funds, which were previously hesitant about short selling, are now more willing to participate on a large scale thanks to the legal framework. Regulation hasn’t killed short selling; rather, it has made it safer and more credible, attracting more capital into the market.
The crypto market has yet to truly learn this lesson.
1973: Options standardization – from one direction to four directions.
On April 26, 1973, the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) opened. On the first day, only call options on 16 stocks could be traded. Put options were added in 1977. That same year, Fischer Black and Myron Scholes published the Black-Scholes option pricing model, which revolutionized financial history and provided the mathematical foundation for options trading.
The significance of options lies in expanding the dimensions of market speculation from two (buy/sell) to four (buy call/buy put/sell call/sell put). For the first time, investors can express their market judgments in a very precise way—not just “up or down,” but “when, at what speed, and by how much.”
More importantly, options provide institutional investors with a complete hedging arsenal. The great bull market of the 1980s (the S&P 500 rose more than 2200% between 1982 and 2000) was directly triggered by Volcker’s control of inflation, Reagan’s tax cuts, and deregulation, but options provided the risk management infrastructure that allowed institutions to dare to increase their positions. With hedging capabilities, institutions dared to take larger positions; with more people daring to take larger positions, more funds flowed in, and a bull market ensued.
For wealthy individuals and institutions, controlling drawdowns is more important than how much they can earn—uncontrollable risk means large funds cannot enter the market.
1996-1997: Retail investors broke in.
NASDAQ has been an electronic exchange since its inception in 1971—the first of its kind in human history. The real changes that occurred in 1996-1997 were two things: the SEC’s Order Handling Rules broke the market makers’ monopoly on pricing; and online brokers (E*Trade, Ameritrade) reduced trading commissions from $50-$100 to below $10.
The bubble eventually burst, but NASDAQ’s market capitalization remains far higher after the bubble burst than before the changes—because the increase in participants brought about by infrastructure upgrades is irreversible.
1993-2010s: The maturation of a complete ecosystem.
Many people believe that ETFs are a product of the last decade, but the first ETF—SPY (tracking the S&P 500)—was listed on the US stock exchange in 1993. In 2001, the SEC mandated decimalization, narrowing the bid-ask spread from $0.125 to $0.01, significantly reducing transaction costs. Between 2005 and 2010, high-frequency trading (HFT) emerged, at one point accounting for over 60% of daily trading volume in the US stock market. Quantitative strategies, ETF arbitrage, long-short hedging—all types of strategies now have standardized tools to support them.
At this point, the system of trading tools for the US stock market is fully mature. Long positions, short positions, hedging, arbitrage—every type of strategy can find a suitable entry point. Result:
The pattern is crystal clear: prosperity arises whenever a new trading mechanism allows more people to participate in the market in more ways. (See diagram below)
III. Eight Years of Crypto Market Development: Two Hundred Years of Evolution Completed in Eight Years
What took Wall Street two centuries to complete—from Binance’s launch in 2017 to the maturity of perpetual contracts—took less than eight years. But it got stuck at the altcoin level.
2017 – The Year of the Sycamore Tree
Binance has launched, but only spot trading is available. The strategy is the same as that of a broker in 1792: buy, hold, and wait for the price to rise.
The ICO bubble is the best example. Everyone is buying, so prices can only rise. Then the buying power dries up—in a market without short sellers, there’s no natural support without short covering, and prices freefall. The bottom depends on when the last bull gives up. Altcoins completely collapse. This is exactly the same market characteristic as the sycamore era of 1792.
2016-2019 – Short-selling weapons debut.
In May 2016, BitMEX launched the XBTUSD perpetual contract—the first short-selling tool in the crypto market. In September 2019, Binance launched the BTC/USDT perpetual contract, bringing short selling into the mainstream.
What happened? It’s exactly the same thing that happened after short selling was introduced on Wall Street in the 1860s: liquidity exploded, price discovery became two-way, and volatility structurally decreased.
BTC’s 30-day annualized volatility has decreased from over 150% during the 2017 bull market to 60-90% during the 2020-2021 bull market—the increase was greater, but the volatility is more orderly. Sharp rises and falls still occur, but the situation of “three months of low-volume decline” has significantly decreased, because short sellers will cover at certain price levels, forming natural support.
More importantly, the scale of capital has shifted dramatically. With hedging tools available, institutional funds are willing to enter the market on a large scale. You can’t expect a fund manager managing billions of dollars to throw money into a market where you can only go long and can’t hedge. Perpetual contracts not only give retail investors the right to short, but they also provide the entire market with the infrastructure that allows “institutional investors to enter.”
Derivatives’ share of total trading volume rose from less than 10% in 2017 to approximately 90% in March 2026—derivatives have completely dominated pricing power in the crypto market.
Short selling didn’t kill BTC. Short selling transformed BTC from a $10 billion speculative asset into a $2 trillion asset class.
2020-2021 – DeFi Summer: More Than Just a Narrative, It Was an Evolution of Mechanisms.
The options markets for BTC and ETH matured rapidly in 2020-2021 (primarily Deribit). This was the “CBOE moment of 1973” for the crypto market—institutions could not only short sell, but also precisely hedge and construct structured positions. The dimensions of strategies expanded from two-dimensional to a higher dimension.
Furthermore, many people categorize DeFi Summer as a “narrative”—just another trend, like the NFT craze and the metaverse concept. But this is a fundamental misinterpretation. The essence of DeFi Summer is not a narrative, but a structural leap in trading mechanisms.
AMMs (Automated Market Makers) have rewritten the underlying logic of trading. Before Uniswap, trading required order books, market makers, and centralized matching. AMMs overturned all of that—anyone can create a liquidity pool using two tokens, anyone can trade instantly without counterparty orders, and without anyone’s permission. This isn’t just a narrative; it’s a paradigm shift in trading infrastructure. It enabled thousands of long-tail tokens that previously had no market to gain liquidity for the first time.
Lending protocols have created on-chain leverage and revolving strategies. Aave and Compound allow users to collateralize assets to borrow another asset—essentially on-chain margin trading. More importantly, it has spawned “revolving loans”: collateralizing ETH to borrow stablecoins, using the stablecoins to buy more ETH, and then collateralizing again… This strategy is called leveraged long in traditional finance, and in DeFi it’s packaged as “yield farming,” but the underlying logic is exactly the same—it’s a new way of playing the game, allowing participants to engage in the market with more multi-dimensional strategies.
Composability allows for exponential growth in mechanism innovation. AMM + lending + liquidity mining + cross-protocol arbitrage—these combinations of “money Lego” create a strategic space never before seen in traditional finance. Each new combination represents a new way of participating, and each new way of participating brings new funds and new users.
Therefore, the super bull market of 2020-2021 was not due to the superposition of two factors, but three: the perpetual contracts/options of BTC and ETH provided institutions with channels for entry and exit, and the AMM and lending protocols of DeFi brought about a qualitative change in the on-chain transaction mechanism. The narrative is just the surface packaging of the evolution of these two mechanisms.
This once again confirms the same pattern: every evolution of the trading mechanism has spurred the next round of prosperity.
2021-2023 – Perpetual Expansion of Altcoins
Binance has started listing perpetual contracts for an increasing number of altcoins. Each new coin listed on PERP experiences a dramatic increase in trading volume—not because listing on PERP is good news, but because the introduction of short-selling tools allows for the participation of more diverse investment strategies. Quantitative funds can now market-make, hedge funds can arbitrage, and trend traders can short sell. This diversity of participants directly translates to greater liquidity depth.
The pattern continues to hold true: BTC experienced a major bull market after being granted perp, as did ETH and SOL; every altcoin that received perp experienced a liquidity leap.
2023-2025 – The Time When Patterns Fail
Then, if nothing unexpected happens, something unexpected will happen. Just like in an idol drama, you’ll encounter an “obstacle” around the corner, but it’s an obstacle.
From the second half of 2023 to Q3 2025, Binance launched perpetual contracts for altcoins at an unprecedented pace. New perp trading pairs were launched almost every week—from mainstream public chain tokens to AI concept coins, from GameFi to Meme, and even some projects with market capitalizations of only tens of millions received perpetual contracts.
On the surface, this appears to be a continuation of historical patterns: providing more short-selling tools for more assets, creating more liquidity, and attracting more participants. Objectively speaking, these perpetual contracts are indeed creating liquidity out of thin air—a project with a FDV of billions but an actual circulating market capitalization of only tens of millions cannot support decent trading depth solely through the spot market. The market makers of perpetual contracts provide two-sided quotes using stablecoins, essentially injecting a layer of synthetic liquidity into these paper-thin markets.
But this time, the pattern didn’t work.
The problem lies in the disconnect between “liquidity” and “confidence.” Creating liquidity requires someone willing to gamble. But the reality in 2024-2025 is that everyone is afraid. The current market treats going up to PERP as the end point, an exit signal, and news-driven trading.
Retail investors are scared. After the FTX collapse, the Luna crash, and countless Rug pulls, retail investors’ trust in altcoins has plummeted. Even more devastating is the distorted tokenomics of many newly listed projects on PERP: billions in FDV coupled with extremely low circulating supply means a massive amount of tokens are waiting to be unlocked and dumped. Retail investors aren’t fools—if you give me a tool to short, but the underlying asset is a deliberately designed, slow-draining machine, why should I participate? Whether I’m going long or short, I don’t want to touch it.
Market makers are scared. The launch of perpetual contracts means their market manipulation is exposed to short sellers. Previously, in the pure spot market, market makers could pump and dump at low cost, with short sellers posing no threat. With PERP, every pump can attract a large number of short positions, drastically increasing the cost of maintaining the price. Many projects are not responding by accepting the game, but by simply lying low—stopping pumping and letting the price naturally decline, since they can sell the unlocked tokens slowly. Without pumping, there’s no profit-making effect; without profit-making, no one will trade.
Market makers are scared. That’s the crux of the matter. Providing perpetual contract market making for a project with a daily spot trading volume of only a few hundred thousand dollars is extremely risky. The liquidity is too thin, prices are easily manipulated, and market makers’ inventory risk is difficult to hedge. In extreme market conditions, market makers simply can’t close their positions. After several failed attempts, market makers began tightening their quotes, widening spreads, reducing depth, and even withdrawing from the market altogether. Without market makers willing to work on perpetual contracts, liquidity is just an empty shell.
Worse still, those altcoin perpetual contracts that are still in operation have become private casinos for big players.
For altcoins with small circulating supply and concentrated holdings, market manipulators can do almost anything on the PERP market. Pumping the price doesn’t require much capital—they control the supply in the spot market to drive up the price, while simultaneously profiting from short covering on PERP. Pumping the price is equally easy—they open a short position on PERP, then dump the supply in the spot market, profiting from the short sellers’ losses. Repeatedly, PERP’s high leverage becomes a tool for market manipulators to amplify profits, rather than a weapon for retail investors to hedge risks.
This kind of manipulation is far more destructive than market manipulation in the spot market. In the spot market, market makers deceive retail investors who buy at the bottom; in PERP, market makers harvest profits from both long and short positions—regardless of whether you’re long or short, as long as you’re on the opposite side of the market maker, your margin becomes their profit. Experienced traders dare not touch these counterfeit PERPs, while inexperienced traders who enter are repeatedly fleeced and eventually leave forever.
Short selling tools are supposed to be a check on market manipulators. But on the extremely illiquid altcoin PERP, the opposite is true: short selling has become another weapon in the hands of market manipulators. It’s not just damaging the ecosystem of a single coin, but destroying trust in the entire crypto market. Every trader targeted and liquidated on PERP is a permanently lost user from the crypto market.
A paradox has emerged: Binance is listing more and more perp, but the trading volume and activity in the altcoin market are actually shrinking.
What does this tell us? It means that the upgrade mechanism of perpetual contracts for altcoins has reached its limit. A perpetual contract is a heavy machine that requires market makers, oracles, funding fees, and centralized approval to operate. BTC and ETH can afford to maintain this machine, but thousands of long-tail altcoins cannot—the machine is running, but it’s out of fuel. And those machines that are barely running have become cash cows for market manipulators.
IV. Why Perpetual Contracts Are Doomed to Fail for Altcoins
The results of the experiments from 2023 to 2025 have been released, and here we will explain why from a mechanistic perspective.
A vicious cycle of liquidity. PERP requires market makers to provide two-sided quotes for stablecoins. Who would be willing to provide market maker services for an unknown project with a daily trading volume of hundreds of thousands of dollars? Without market makers, there is no liquidity; without liquidity, there are no traders; and without traders, market makers will not come. Spot leveraged short selling does not require building a derivatives market from scratch—borrow tokens and sell them in existing DEX pools. Lending protocols provide supply, and AMMs provide execution; the two are decoupled.
Two prices, two worlds. PERP and spot trading are two separate pools; when the pools are thin, a single trade can widen the price difference to an absurd degree. You think you’re shorting this project, but you’re actually gambling in a parallel universe decoupled from spot trading. Spot leverage, from beginning to end, has only one market; there’s no decoupling.
Funding rates are being manipulated. Market makers are driving up the price of PERP to create extreme funding rates, draining short sellers’ funds every few hours, even if they are on the right side of the trade. Even worse, market makers are simultaneously manipulating both the spot market and PERP – pumping up the spot market while simultaneously liquidating short sellers in PERP. Spot leverage, on the other hand, is only determined by the lending rate, which is driven by supply and demand and is not distorted by the long/short ratio.
Synthetic positions do not generate real selling pressure. This is the most crucial point. When shorting on PERP, no sell orders will appear in the spot market. Market makers are simply moving money from one hand to the other in the spot market, and shorting PERP poses no threat to them. Spot leveraged shorting involves borrowing real tokens to sell in the spot market—real selling pressure directly affects the price, and market makers must use real money to buy these orders in order to maintain a high price.
Approval + Oracle. PERP requires exchange approval and a reliable oracle, both of which are lacking for smaller cryptocurrencies. On-chain lending and short selling do not require approval; the liquidation price depends on the AMM’s real-time price.
Perpetual contracts are a heavy infrastructure, with operating costs exceeding the value they can create for long-tail assets. Altcoins need the lightest form of short selling—borrow tokens, sell them, and buy them back to repay the loan if the price drops. This is spot leveraged short selling.
V. Fear of short selling, or fear of the lack of price discovery?
From Amsterdam in 1609 to Wall Street in the 1860s to Crypto Twitter in 2024, the fear of short selling has never changed. “Short selling will crash the market.” “Short selling is a malicious attack.” “Short selling will cause the market to collapse.” — For four hundred years, the wording has remained almost unchanged.
But four hundred years of history have repeatedly proven the same fact: the cost of short selling out of fear is far greater than short selling itself.
When criticism is not allowed, praise loses its meaning. When short selling is not allowed, going long also loses its meaning.
Because in a market where you can only buy, prices only reflect half of the optimistic view. The pessimistic half—doubt, negative news, fraud—is forcibly silenced. Everyone can only “like”; no one can “dislike.”
Such prices are distorted, fragile, and unsustainable. They are not price discovery, but price illusion.
Being able to go long or short is the most basic respect for price discovery.
Only with genuine price discovery can a market have a sustainable future. Institutions dare to participate because prices are credible; market makers dare to participate because they can trade in both directions; long-term investors dare to participate because current prices have withstood the test of bears and are not lines drawn by market manipulators.
Conversely, a market without price discovery can only survive on narratives. Each wave of hype ends in chaos, then the next narrative attracts another wave of people to buy in. It’s a perpetual cycle, never accumulating value.
The biggest tragedy in the altcoin market isn’t that there are too many market manipulators, but that it lacks even the basic conditions for price discovery. If prices aren’t genuine, how can you talk about long-term value?
VI. Short selling is not a tool for shorting, but a catalyst for bull markets.
The most counterintuitive pattern in history: in the long run, every introduction of short-selling mechanisms has not lowered prices, but rather raised them.
After short selling became widespread in the 1860s, NYSE trading volume increased tenfold in ten years, transforming Wall Street from a small circle into a true capital market. Following the uptick rule legalizing short selling in 1938, institutional funds entered the market on a massive scale, and the S&P 500 rose 340% in the following 30 years. After the introduction of CBOE options in 1973, options trading volume increased 10,000 times in 50 years, ushering in decades of continuous expansion for the US stock market. After the launch of BTC perpetual contracts in 2019, BTC volatility decreased from 150% to 50%, yet its market capitalization ballooned from $10 billion to $2 trillion.
Each time, the outcome is not a market crash, but a market expansion. There are three reasons for this:
Short selling creates liquidity – every short order is a sell order plus a future buy order (covering), and the more active the short selling, the deeper the liquidity.
Short selling attracts new participants—market makers, quantitative funds, hedge funds, and arbitrageurs are not there to dump the market, but to provide liquidity, and liquidity is the oxygen of a bull market.
Short selling builds trust – a price that has been tested by short sellers is a credible price, a credible price attracts real funds, and real funds drive real price increases.
A complete game theory tool does not destroy confidence, but builds it.
VII. The Path to the Next Bull Market
From Amsterdam in 1609 to the crypto market in 2025, four centuries of financial history have repeatedly verified the same pattern: first comes the evolution of mechanisms, then comes prosperity. This order cannot be reversed.
The current altcoin market is trapped in a death spiral: only long positions are allowed → the business model is too simplistic → fewer and fewer people are making money → fewer and fewer people are trading → liquidity dries up → market stagnation. Even gambling allows betting on big or small, so why can’t altcoins be shorted?
Perpetual contracts cannot solve this problem—the experiments from 2023-2025 have already proven this. Perp is heavy infrastructure, which long-tail altcoins cannot afford. “Listing Perp” itself has become yet another narrative trigger, just like “listing spot” or “listing Alpha,” becoming a pretext for news trading, detached from trading and game theory itself. Trading tools are supposed to serve trading, but now they have become the objects of trading—for long-tail assets, Perp is structurally a flawed tool.
The correct approach is on-chain ” native spot leveraged short selling”—borrowing real tokens through over-collateralized lending, selling them in the spot market to generate real selling pressure, and participating in genuine price discovery. This eliminates the need for market makers to build a market from scratch, oracles to maintain a peg, funding rates to smooth out price spreads, and any form of approval.
This aligns with the historical trajectory of every short-selling mechanism’s emergence. Le Maire’s short-selling in 1609 wasn’t approved by the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. Short selling on Wall Street in the 1850s wasn’t designed by the NYSE. They were all spontaneously created by market participants—the tools came first, then the rules. What the SEC did in 1938 wasn’t inventing short selling, but rather establishing a regulatory framework for short-selling practices that had been in operation for nearly a century.
On-chain short-selling protocols all follow the same path.
When this happens—when an altcoin is no longer just a one-way game of “buy and wait for the price to rise,” but a real-money battle between bulls and bears in the spot market—the quality of the market will fundamentally change. Liquidity will return, participants will return, and funds will return. Not because there’s a new story to tell, but because there’s a new way to play.
If historical patterns continue to hold true—and we have no reason to believe they won’t—then the trigger for the next altcoin bull market will not be a new narrative, a celebrity endorsement, or a halving.
It will be an infrastructure upgrade: enabling thousands of long-tail altcoins to access on-chain native spot leverage short-selling tools—this is where the crypto world has pricing power.
This time, it’s not the case that BTC liquidity overflows into altcoins, but the other way around.
VIII. Conclusion
In 1609, the Dutch government banned short selling, and le Maire was publicly condemned. In the 1860s, the US Congress denounced short sellers as enemies of the nation. After the 1929 crash, the public demanded the complete eradication of short selling. In 2024, “short selling” remains a vulgar term in the crypto community.
Four hundred years have passed, and people’s fear of short selling has never changed.
But four hundred years of history have repeatedly proven the same thing: every time this fear was overcome and short-selling was introduced into the market, the market didn’t collapse—it expanded. Amsterdam became a global financial center. Wall Street transformed from a sycamore tree into a trillion-dollar capital market. Binance became the universe’s largest exchange. Bitcoin grew from $10 billion to $2 trillion.
Currently, thousands of altcoins are locked in a “long-only” cage. Without short selling, there is no price discovery; without price discovery, there is no trust; without trust, there is no sustainable prosperity. The entire market has degenerated into a single game of betting on “expectations”—fewer and fewer people are making money, fewer and fewer are participating, and it’s becoming increasingly quiet. Meanwhile, for those altcoins that have managed to secure perpetual contracts, short selling has become a new tool for market manipulators to exploit, accelerating the erosion of market trust.
When criticism is not allowed, praise loses its meaning. When short selling is not permitted—or short selling is only the privilege of market manipulators—prices will never be true.
What’s more terrifying than the fear brought by short selling is a market without price discovery.
Bull markets are never something you wait for; they are born from the evolution of mechanisms. And the core of each such evolution, from 1609 to the present day, has always been the same thing—
Give short selling rights back to the market .
Who’s willing to join us and shout out, “Whether you’re bullish or not, you can short it!” (inspired by @heyibinance )
