If you don’t want to read the full Magic Eden article, here’s the TL;DR: Magic Eden asked people to lock $ME for years. Then, while those people were still locked in, almost everything around them changed. • 225M $ME reserved for active-user rewards over 4 years • 159M $ME allocated to ecosystem development • Season 1 needed a 2.3M $ME corrective top-up • The seasonal reward model changed • The Community Fund launched with only 5M $ME • Bitcoin marketplace support ended • EVM marketplace support ended • Bitcoin/Runes infrastructure ended • Magic Eden Wallet shut down • USDC revenue sharing became the new reward model • Some major stakers are now publicly reporting claim issues • Then Magic Eden committed $75M to Dicey And while all of this was happening, many of the creators, researchers, Spaces hosts and community builders actually carrying the culture around $ME were barely being amplified by the team and accounts that were supposed to represent them. That’s the part people miss. This was never just “the token went down.” It was people making long-term commitments to one ecosystem, then watching that ecosystem get dismantled and rewritten around them while they were still locked in. That’s why I call it the $ME slow rug.