Ctrip is under investigation by the State Administration for Market Regulation for violating the Anti-Monopoly Law.

Ctrip's stock price immediately showed a solid downward trend, with both Hong Kong and US stock markets plunging during after-hours trading.

In simple terms: the platform's power is too concentrated, and now it’s being systematically dealt with by the broader environment.

The stock price immediately voted with its feet; this is not just sentiment, but the market anticipating that the rules of the game are about to be rewritten.

In the crypto world, it’s all too familiar—exchanges manipulating prices, project teams pumping the market, stablecoins operating in black boxes—all fundamentally the same: as scale increases, it becomes easier to treat the rules as internal parameters.

During a bull market, no one cares; once the impact becomes significant, regulators will step in.

Many underestimate the destructive power of the words “anti-monopoly.” It may not kill you outright, but it will directly shrink your imagination for the next few years.

So, true alpha is not about monopoly, but about low substitutability and not relying on power to sustain.

This is also why, in the long run, the market will always assign a premium to more transparent and decentralized structures.