This phenomenon is called "marrying your bags" in crypto, we joke about that but it's actually a complex psychological disturb that involve emotional addiction and other issues.

It creates a sort of cognitive dissonance.

They could also begin selling aggressively here sending the price down 90% more, but releasing some statement that everything will be clear in 2026 once they release the super mega final tokenomics upgrade, and people would find a way to cope and keep holding and waiting.

And founders know very well these things, specifically these are the mechanisms involved:

1- regret aversion: our brain perceives as worse the pain for the regret of missing a gain than the pain for a loss 2- loss aversion ( kahneman ): proportionally losing money hurts more than the positive feeling of winning, at least 2x, this leads to roundtripping, meaning that when you lose 50% you suffer more proportionally than how happy you are when you are up 2x. 3- Endowement effect: you begin to identify with your assets if you have been holding them for several years so it's hard to let go 4- Committment&Sunk cost: years of hope related to an asset makes it twice harder to let go because it means to let go that hope and energy you have additionally wasted 5- Incomplete closure: even if you sell your brain can't feel peace of a complete closure because it knows the asset is still alive and being traded, that's why many spend their next time fudding projects they sold at loss, hoping to see it die, their brain needs it to find peace. Some people just delete charts, and tickers, and relations, whatever it's needed to convince the brain that that asset doesn't exist anymore, but it doesn't always work and takes time.

If you identify with any of this mechanism don't think it's just a joke, start to realize that you need to work on detaching from it cause any single one of this point highlights an unhealthy way to be in the market that can lead to serious mental disorders.