Sometimes I want to reflect: when did retail investors truly start becoming the "bagholders"?

Actually, it’s not something that suddenly happened in a certain year, but rather the pricing power gradually shifted from the public market to the financing stage.
Initially, with projects like E, the ICO price was $0.31, and the secondary market was just over $0.4; the primary and secondary prices were almost the same, so even if you missed the earliest round, your cost wasn’t significantly higher, and the upside was fully reserved for the market later on. Between 2018 and 2020, for example with SOL, clear cost stratification began to appear: seed rounds at $0.04, secondary prices at a minimum of $0.5, a tenfold difference. But the issue was that at that time, the narrative and growth hadn’t been exhausted, and the market was willing to continue raising valuations, so retail investors paid a bit more to enter and still benefited from the subsequent major rally.
The real change happened after 2020, not because projects got worse, but because the gameplay changed. Funding rounds increased, valuations were continually front-loaded, and prices were "designed" before listing. For projects like OP and STRK, it was no longer about discovering the price through listing, but about taking the pre-set price to the market for realization. During the private funding stage, FDV was continuously inflated, and at the moment of listing, what was given to the secondary market was not room for growth, but an overextended valuation. The price fluctuations you see are just volatility; the real profits had already been distributed in the unseen stages.
As a result, the structure completely changed: previously, primary was cheap and secondary was used to grow the pie together; now, primary sets the price, and secondary is responsible for providing liquidity. Going further, low circulation and high FDV became the norm, making it easier to push prices higher and dump, with airdrops turning into a stabilization mechanism, and TGE increasingly resembling a liquidity release point rather than an origin.
So the issue isn’t that retail investors have weakened, but that the upside potential no longer remains in the public market. If you still play with the old logic of "holding and waiting for the bull market," in this new structure, you’re likely to burn yourself at high valuations. Those who can still make money now are essentially doing something different: watching the rhythm, monitoring unlocks, seeking liquidity windows, thinking about exiting before entering—basically, this market has shifted from a game of guessing to one of understanding who knows this distribution game best.