I've watched this movie too many times. Builders spend years shipping new wallets, L2s, yield farms, and whatever else gets funded that cycle, then act surprised when daily active users crater the second prices stop ripping. The product side got most of the attention and capital. Keeping regular people around never did.

Look at the numbers from the last cycle. A bunch of major DeFi protocols hit peak TVL in late 2021, then lost 70-80% of it by mid-2022. What matters more is the user side: many top apps saw daily active addresses cut in half or worse once the easy money dried up. New users showed up for airdrops or 100x narratives, then vanished when the math stopped working.

"The bull market brings the tourists, but the bear market reveals who actually gives a damn about this stuff."

The industry keeps treating retention like a marketing problem. Throw more points programs, referral bonuses, or gamified quests at it. That stuff works for a quarter or two. Then the same users rotate to the next shiny thing because nothing actually changed about how clunky or expensive or risky the experience feels when the market is flat.

Real retention comes from boring stuff most teams ignore. Reliable withdrawals that don't cost $15. Interfaces that don't require reading three docs to bridge assets. Apps that still function when Bitcoin is crabbing for months. Most projects would rather launch another token than fix those basics because tokens get press and fixes don't.

I've talked to plenty of normies who tried crypto in 2021. The common story is they got in through an exchange promo, messed around with a couple apps, then got hit with a failed transaction or a rug-adjacent token and just left. They didn't come back in 2023 or 2024 either. That churn is permanent unless the experience stops punishing people for not being power users.

The current narrative around institutional money and ETFs won't fix this. Those flows don't create sticky retail behavior. They just add another layer of abstraction. The people actually using protocols day to day still deal with the same friction that drove them away last time. Until that changes, every new bull run will keep looking like a temporary tourist spike.

Bottom line, the next two years will separate projects that can hold users through quiet periods from the ones that only exist when prices are pumping. Most won't make the cut because they still think building more features beats making the existing ones not suck for normal people.