$DOT Polkadot is essentially an "engineer's utopia"; what Gavin Wood wanted from the beginning was an "internet of blockchains", not to create a faster and cheaper Ethereum, but to enable a bunch of completely differently designed chains to truly and natively communicate with each other securely. This idea is captivating yet arrogant because it assumes:

1. The future will certainly require many heterogeneous chains to coexist;

2. Everyone will be willing to pay a high upfront cost for this "interoperability".

So what happened? The market voted with its feet.

People found that 99.9% of applications actually do not need that many heterogeneous chains; a single fast and cheap chain (Solana) or a comprehensive smart contract chain (Ethereum + L2) is enough.

The team at Parity is one of the most obsessive and execution-driven technical teams I have ever seen; they would rather let the project price drop to 1 dollar than stop working, as evidenced by the continuous iteration of Substrate and their commitment to the Rust ecosystem.

Polkadot is like IPv6 in 1998: technologically advanced, poor user experience, ridiculed, and its price collapsing came as no surprise to anyone.

Therefore, personally, I have been slowly accumulating around 2 dollars, not because I believe it will quickly rebound, but because I am betting on a possibility:

If there really comes a day of "inter-chain internet", this ticket may become very valuable; and if not, I will only lose the little money I have now, as I never expected it to multiply 10 times next year.