Author: NingNing
This moment is just like that moment.
Now, the breadth and depth of the popularity of nihilism in the crypto industry are comparable to Q3 and Q4 of 2019. At that time, the crypto industry fell into an involutionary innovation pattern of Fomo3D, EOS gambling Dapp, and ultra-high leverage perpetual contracts, frantically squeezing the last drop of liquidity in the market, practitioners lost faith and confidence, the "crypto = Ponzi" theory was rampant, and the tail CEX launched multi-level rebate ambassador programs.
At that time, an OG brother told me personally that the entire crypto industry was dead and advised me to "be a good person". However, only 9 months later, DeFi Summer came amid waves of doubts and ridicules, completely reshaping the industry with "disruptive" innovation, and the "value Internet" began to emerge.
As time goes by and cycles rotate, the crypto industry seems to have fallen into the quagmire of five years ago again. The disastrous start of some top-tier project tokens after TGE has made the market's collective psychology unprecedentedly tired of and disgusted with VC narratives. The vague concept of "value coin" has been intentionally or unintentionally created as an object of ridicule and insult. Irrationality, deconstruction, fragmentation, emotion, and noise have unprecedentedly dominated the entire crypto market.
Some well-known VCs even shouted "Meme is king" to cater to the market trend and squeeze liquidity and profits from the irrational market structure. Although some VC bosses stood up and said "meme is not everything in Crypto", they were collectively criticized by retail investors in the market.
Little do people know that the meme craze on Solana is a conspiracy by the Solana ecosystem to seize the liquidity of the long-tail assets on the Ethereum mainnet. The wealth myths of those insiders and smart money are no different from the billion-dollar jackpot of the Double Color Ball, which is bait to lure retail investors into a series of PvPvP games that are destined to lose EV. The eruption of the Base chain meme is a choice that the Ethereum ecosystem has to face.
Today, the market's attention and liquidity are all being siphoned off by the long-running Web3 competition between the Ethereum ecosystem and the Solana ecosystem. In addition to the aforementioned liquidity competition, Solana has launched new primitives, ZK Compression and Blinks, to compete with Ethereum in scalability and Web3 social areas.
The smoke released by this war without gunpowder permeates the entire crypto market, obscuring everyone's vision and making the market ignore the paradigm innovations of edge nodes in the Crypto industry map, such as Dapp Rollup, chain abstraction, AI Oracle, AI Dapp, Consumer Chain, ZK coprocessor network, Bitcoin ecology, etc. These paradigm innovations from the edge will subvert and reshape the entire industry in the next innovation cycle, just like the previous round of DeFi.
As an emerging technology, Crypto and Web3 obey the law of the Gartner emerging technology growth curve, and will go through stages such as technology germination, expectation expansion, bubble burst, slow repair, and stable maturity. We must remain rational during the expectation expansion period; we must also remain rational during the bubble burst period.
In the past two days, Peter, the leader of the Ethereum Foundation, has become popular in his tweet expressing his regret for entering the wrong industry. He compared the value of the iteration of the SpaceX engine with the value of the iteration of Web3 technology, and frankly criticized our industry for the fact that there has been no value creation but only value circulation over the years.
He is right. But the cultural and economic system he lives in does not make him feel deeply about the value of value circulation. For those of us who live in a non-free market environment, it is no exaggeration to say that BTC and the Web3 value network are the only way to salvation for our generation.
