At Paris Blockchain Week 2025, Youngsun Shin—Head of Product at Flipster—offered his unfiltered perspective on the ongoing changes in crypto trading. Once a space for early adopters and optimistic HODLers, the market has become a high-stakes PvP playground dominated by institutions, algorithms, and increasingly sophisticated participants.

In this shifting landscape, Shin doesn’t pull punches:

“Even if you’re holding some major altcoin, you’re as good as getting liquidated… it’s just going to zero.”

So, how can regular retail traders hope to perform well in the evolving crypto market space? How can they hope to remain afloat given the rising competition from their professional counterparts? That’s what we try to find out in this exciting interview.

The Death of Passive Participation

For years, the advice to “just buy and hold” worked remarkably well. That’s no longer the case.

“Back in those days, there were like five tokens… whatever you buy, the next cycle after the dip would essentially make all of these go back up,” Shin recalled. “Now, every day, we’re seeing just infinite amount of token[s] getting minted and supplied into the market.”

The simplicity of the past—where scarcity alone drove value—is gone. With millions of random altcoins flooding exchanges and utility increasingly questioned, today’s retail investor must compete in a saturated market.

“You’re basically going to zero, but the chances are you will not recover it,” Shin said bluntly. “So where do you exit?”

He likens holding spot crypto in today’s market to being in a leveraged position in perpetual contracts. “That’s basically your maintenance margin.”

The Challenges of the Modern-Day Exchange Space

Shin spoke about some of the pressing challenges and pressure points of the modern-day exchange space.

“The exchange space is super crowded and congested… If you open up 50 exchange applications, 49 of them would look the same with different colors.”

While the surface-level competition is fierce, Shin argues that meaningful innovation is rare. Some platforms chase listing fees or volume without improving user experience. The result? Overwhelmed retail users facing complex financial products with little guidance.

“We try to solve [that] a lot of the exchange products still for retail users… are just plain out hard.”

In an era when institutions dominate price movement and arbitrage opportunities vanish in milliseconds, exchanges need to do more than display candlestick charts and flashing prices — they need to empower retail with insight.

Context, Not Just Candles

But what does that even mean? For Shin, it’s not just about real-time price feeds—it’s about context.

“We don’t want users to just see, ‘Oh, Bitcoin just crashed.’ We want to give more contextual information that would help them make a decision.”

He points to examples like macroeconomic announcements or regulatory changes that immediately influence prices but are often disconnected from what users see in their apps. A notification that Bitcoin has dropped $2,000 is meaningless without knowing why.

He acknowledges that trading isn’t just about tools—it’s also about emotions.

“Trading is a very lonely activity,” he said. “You’re with this crowd or community… but it still feels like you’re alone.”

This is where social trading comes in and Shin said that it might now make you win better but it will definitely make you feel better.

The Inevitable Maturity of Crypto Markets

The golden age of “everyone wins” is over. Institutional players are here, and Shin makes it clear: “There are crypto hedge funds, they are quants traders… already pouncing upon arbitrage opportunities.”

With fewer “new retail users” coming in, platforms can no longer rely on a fresh wave of liquidity. “Some of the apps have half the population, if not more, already registered… which means there aren’t much more to come.”

Unless sentiment or technology shifts dramatically, Shin suggests that this might just be the new normal.

DISCLAIMER: This interview was produced in partnership with Paris Blockchain Week 2025.