Everyone enters the market thinking they are the hunter, and no one wants to admit they are the prey. But looking at the three incidents of MYX, COAI, and RIVER, it becomes clear that the actual outcomes for participants are often vastly different from expectations.

The story of hedgers is the most ironic. Early airdrop whales holding spot positions wanted to lock in profits and avoid declines. Sounds rational, right—pay a small fee as insurance, and you’re guaranteed profit. But what happened? During these coins’ price rallies, they had to pay a fee rate of -1% to -2% per hour, making the costs absurdly high. If a secondary surge occurs (as RIVER might experience later), short positions can be liquidated in minutes, ending up with losses on both sides, turning insurance into a money-losing venture.

The fate of retail longs is even more straightforward. Seeing the high funding rates, they think, "Earn free yield, risk-free arbitrage," and follow the trend to open long positions. But they don’t realize the role they’re playing—the perfect counterparty when the market maker dumps the price. During RIVER, these retail longs were completely liquidated, with their principal wiped out overnight. MYX and COAI have already repeated this script.

There is only one true winner. What are the market makers controlling the market doing in this game? They set a trap that everyone willingly walks into. In the rent collection phase, they continuously siphon off funds from hedgers; in the harvest phase, the collateral of retail traders liquidated after a dump becomes the main profit. MYX and COAI have validated this logic, and RIVER is executing it. This is the cruelest truth of the derivatives market: what appears to be a fair game is actually a division between hunters and prey from the very start.