Market momentum is fueled by storytelling, yet downturns persist, revealing the true nature of cryptocurrency's explosive growth patterns.

In every crypto cycle, some blockchain sectors tend to stand out. The ICO mania in the first two cycles and the DeFi flood in 2020-21, alongside NFTs, were standouts back then. More recently, in 2024-25, it was mostly the L1 tokens that seized public attention.

RWA projects and crypto AI tokens also did well, but the euphoria didn’t match that of the previous cycles. The privacy narrative seized hold toward the end of the crypto bull market.

ZCash [$ZEC] was one of the biggest beneficiaries of this narrative shift. From August to November 2025, $ZEC rallied 2,052% in three months, from $34.85 to $750, as the privacy discussion intensified.

AMBCrypto covered the strengthened on-chain metrics behind ZCash but also noted that, fundamentally, not much had changed about the privacy token.

Social media conversation may have amplified the importance of privacy in investors’ minds, leading to the extreme capital inflows into $ZEC and the growth in shielded usage.

The ZCash and privacy sector’s run toward the end of 2025 showed the psychology at work behind every past altcoin season. It also shed light on the fact that markets don’t change because the humans driving them don’t change.

Parabolic price action and the narratives behind them

One of the prominent examples of an altcoin parabolic run came in April, from RaveDAO [$RAVE]. Inherently, the token is not a memecoin, though its price action makes it look like one.

This fusion of community governance and live music culture has a $RAVE token, whose supply has come under severe scrutiny.

Only 25.2% of the total 1 billion token supply is in circulation. Moreover, CMC data confirmed that 93.16% of the total supply was still under the control of the top 10 holders.

Source: ZachXBT on X

Its price action in April saw a rally that measured nearly 12,000% from the $0.237 bottom to the $28.57 top. During its run, crypto sleuth ZachXBT had accused insiders of controlling over 90% of the supply and manipulating the price on centralized exchanges.

Source: ZachXBT on X

On Saturday, the 18th of April, the token crashed roughly 90% from its top. Suspicious CEX activity tied to the RaveDAO team on-chain contradicts the team’s claims that they have no involvement with the price action.

Source: ZachXBT on X

For the reasons listed in the post, the investigator stressed that the team, even if not directly responsible, knows who might be.

ZachXBT also listed a few other projects with questionable price action. The biggest, in terms of market cap, was Memecore [M].

Centralized supply distribution should draw heavy scrutiny

Memecoins are driven by social sentiment and community trust. The average meme buyer isn’t concerned with tokenomics and fundamental utility but just wants to be part of a community. Making profits along the way would be a cool addition.

In a way, these tokens do not pretend to offer niche usage or try to construct any complicated selling points. Dogecoin [DOGE] started as a joke but evolved slightly and has been used as a tipping currency.

Pepe [PEPE] is a pure meme, and Shiba Inu [SHIB], with its decentralized ecosystem and partnerships, is somewhere in between.

Memecore is an EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain that aims to connect the community and creators through dApps and memes while creating an application ecosystem beyond Memecore.

Its goals aside, the supply distribution trends place it in the “questionable price action” list that ZachXBT had mentioned on the $RAVE timeline post.

The sleuth challenged the token’s listing on Kraken in July 2025, pointing to $7.9 million in suspicious Kraken withdrawals to 18 newly created addresses with 11.7 million M tokens sitting in total, valued at around $33.8 million now.

ZachXBT challenged Memecore on social media, saying

Please provide a single data point to support your $6B mkt cap at a top 20 token and why insiders hold >90% of supply.

Bubblemaps data showed concentrated holdings, with a Binance deposit address holding 41.5% of the supply. ZachXBT has not shown definitive proof that 90% of the supply was held by insiders but vowed to investigate the matter further.

How do you separate the wheat from the chaff?

In 2025, the market cap of the altcoin sector was unable to convincingly clear the $1.71 trillion peak from 2021.

Source: TOTAL2 on TradingView

Unlike in 2014 and 2017, you cannot throw money at a random ICO and expect a 100x within a few weeks. The altcoin proliferation in the past few years has diluted their appeal to investors, leading to reduced capital flows.

Only select altcoins with legitimate use cases or solving a real problem can hope to survive the brutal bear markets. As ZCash showed, a narrative boost can be of help.

An investor must look at the supply distribution closely. Top holders with a massive share of the total supply are as much a red flag as a high FDV (fully diluted value) and low float.

Healthy vesting mechanics tend to have a 1-year cliff, followed by small monthly unlocks small enough to be absorbed by the market.

Volume trends are not as trustworthy, since wash trading has been, and could continue to be, a part of the market mechanics. However, a combination of these factors should help investors zero in on healthy projects with viable use cases.

Final Summary

The power of narratives in crypto is immense, but it alone is not enough and can even be dangerous.

Traders and investors must be exceedingly cautious when jumping onto a bandwagon of a bullish token. Supply distribution among top holders is one critical factor to watch.