Author: Jocy, Founder of IOSG Ventures
I just happened to see the story of Heaven's Movement of Power recently. The Hundred Days' Reform is still vivid in my mind. It is hard to imagine that in the Qing Dynasty, there were still some young people willing to follow Emperor Guangxu at the risk of being beheaded, advocating the new law that was hundreds of years ahead of the times within the dynasty, learning from the barbarians to control the barbarians, and advocating learning Western reform laws regardless of their personal safety. Although the final result failed, their spirit and actions left a strong mark. Such young people and pioneers have become role models for future generations to admire.
The spirit of these young people is equally important in today's crypto world. At present, many practitioners are shouting that they have suffered from the "Western powers" for a long time, but in fact, they are restaking nesting dolls with their left hand, rushing to run the liquidity pool with their right hand, and constantly posting memes/dogs on Twitter. Everyone knows the crux of the problem, but they all compromise for the current interests. The Eastern and Western crypto communities are currently in a crazy state of hyping memes. Memes are like opium, an input of Western opium. Currently, the top memes on BN are all from the West. Entrepreneurs and community builders will be lost because of such noise, and the Eastern crypto community is deeply trapped in meme hype. After seeing the success of memes, many entrepreneurs will begin to doubt their entrepreneurial direction and the original intention of their struggle. I think entrepreneurs should resist memes, should not turn their entrepreneurial direction to memes, and hype memes in an assembly line!
We need young people who are both down-to-earth and looking up at the stars, especially those entrepreneurs who can shoulder the Eastern crypto ideal. Such young people should not only do trading-related things in this bull market or the last bull market, but should focus on the construction of infra and protocols to create a better community atmosphere. Instead of letting those developers and young people who are interested in entrepreneurship immerse themselves in various meme stories of getting rich every day.
To reiterate my position, I am not against traders who advocate meme supremacy in this market. I personally started to get dogecoin from the community in 2013, and I have always liked this community, but I don’t want meme traders to become the most mainstream faction in the Chinese community. Since the ETF was passed, I have clearly felt that entrepreneurs in the United States and Europe have emerged rapidly. They have received ample capital support from American funds. At the same time, some big American funds have said internally that they will not invest in Chinese Web3 entrepreneurs. In the era of encryption, the East and the West seem to have begun to have huge differences and disagreements from technology to community. While Western technology continues to emerge, the Eastern encryption community has fallen into the craze of meme hype, which is obviously not a healthy development trend.
Meme hype has a certain lottery effect. The probability of latecomers winning the lottery will continue to decline. At the same time, memes, like opium, will make early beneficiaries form path dependence. More people endorse memes in the community (similar to compradors). The community is prone to constantly strengthen such a way of making money, but this does not make our technical protocols and communities more unique and powerful. Early participants may be able to profit from it, but this short-sighted behavior, this gambling game, and the legend of getting rich quickly will eventually burst this bubble and become a disaster for the Eastern crypto market, repeating the story of NFT in the last bull market cycle. For most of the first-line Eastern entrepreneurs, I always believe that they will insist on starting a business in the first line, find their own building blocks in the Lego of infra or applications, and keep pace with the mainstream Western protocols or even lead the trend.
Perhaps the crypto market should not be divided into the East and the West. This is a decentralized world. In the past few cycles, we have seen the various aspects of entrepreneurs in the East and the West: there are reasons for the success of Western entrepreneurs. Rune Christensen, the founder of MakerDAO, has been starting a business in Web3 for many years and has successfully increased its protocol revenue significantly in the environment of high macro interest rates and cryptocurrency bear market in the United States. In March of this year, he launched the Endgame plan and a variety of SubDAOs, including Spark SubDAO, which focuses on lending protocols; the founder of EigenLayer was overloaded with daily meeting arrangements during ETHDenver. In order to communicate with partners in person, each meeting was streamlined to 15/30 minutes. It can be seen that in this global competitive market, many entrepreneurs are sprinting on the front line; the founder of Uniswap was born as a hardware engineer, taught himself solidity to create fifty lines of streamlined code, and led the industry's Dex AMM innovation wave. They have always focused on product design and protocol understanding, pursuing a leading position in the industry. Eastern entrepreneurs are the most resilient and powerful group, and we have seen many outstanding ones, but they still need more support and positive feedback from the community. The Eastern community should be more united and powerful, and spend time discussing how to learn from others and how to support a stronger Eastern mysterious community. When the community and entrepreneurs reach a consensus, the agreement will also bring more positive feedback.
As a fund originated in Asia, IOSG will invest in and support more Chinese entrepreneurs in this cycle, helping them to better enter the Western market and become mainstream. You can't imagine that in three to five years, the mainstream of this industry will still be meme. When we are in the wave of the crypto era, everyone will inevitably become a trend-setter. Everyone is also very small at the foot of the times, but don't ignore the negative energy that everyone is shouting that they should invest in meme and bring to the Chinese community.
Summary: We should be more united and face future challenges together. The community needs higher ideals and visions, and some people need to stand up for the future of the Eastern community. Crypto is not just about memes, there are many opportunities for infrastructure and applications waiting to be explored and discovered, and these are the real industry alphas. IOSG will promote the long-term development of the industry and community by investing in and supporting young people who are at the forefront, and help Eastern entrepreneurs stand out in the global market.
Note: The picture comes from the dogecoin community