Recently, a friend in the finance circle sent me a mysterious "Internal Forecast List" in the middle of the night, listing the future valuations of giants like SpaceX, OpenAI, and ByteDance. But my eyes immediately locked onto the seventh line—Ripple, going public in 2026, with an estimated valuation of $50 billion.

Then came a voice message, with the clear background sound of a New York night rain: "Everyone in the circle is now discussing, if Ripple really IPOs, how will the price of XRP play out? Quite a few big institutions are already using this logic to strategize."

I asked a piercing question: "Where does this $50 billion figure come from? Is it based on signed underwriting contracts, or just a simple linear projection based on the last funding round? Would you dare to bring this 'list' to the compliance department and discuss it?"

There was a pause on the other end of the line for a few seconds. Finally, he only said: "...Everyone in the industry is talking about it. The truth will only be known on the day of the listing."

This scene plays out in the entire crypto world every day. A grand story (like a "hundred-billion-level IPO") suddenly appears, instantly igniting market sentiment, and candlesticks start dancing wildly. But the underlying support for this story—the key data and facts—are often clouded in fog, and no one really questions them.

We seem to have entered a vicious cycle: trusting a distant, complex, fundamentally unverifiable "story" to manipulate trading decisions, while ignoring the on-chain data that is right in front of us, happening in real-time, and fully traceable.

Over-reliance on narratives and lack of rigorous data validation—this is the root cause of many investors falling into traps. When a story becomes sufficiently captivating, rationality is often pushed into the corner.