Original Terry Vernacular Blockchain 2024-01-23 12:03 Published in Anhui
This is the 2016 original issue of Vernacular Blockchain
Author | Terry
Produced by｜Baihua Blockchain (ID: hellobtc)
"Fang Hua", which just ended not long ago, has set off a whirlwind in the investment market and made many people start discussing Shanghai in the 1990s, especially the Yellow River Road and the capital market under the foreign concessions. It is not only the golden age of A Bao, but also reflects the true epitome of many little people in society in the changing trends.
In fact, this is true for many industries - in the early days, things are flourishing, wealth is in the air, and opportunities are almost everywhere. However, as the grassroots development stage fades away, the good days gradually become beautiful memories, and they face the dilemma of everything returning to normal.
"What we love is not "Fanghua", but the era of opportunities everywhere." To some extent, the Web3 industry in the past 10 years is equivalent to the stock market in the 1990s. Now with the approval of the spot Bitcoin ETF and the Web3 industry moving closer to the mainstream, is it time for the "Floral Era" of the crypto world to come to an end?
01
The Crypto World’s Glorious Years
I believe that many friends in the crypto industry have thought about this: if we had the opportunity to go back 10 years, how would we participate in this wave of the times?
Hoard BTC? Become a miner? Found another Bitmain? Or become an early employee of BN? The choices seem to be countless. The past ten years of the crypto world were truly a golden age that broke through the limits of imagination and gave birth to waves of industry legends and bigwigs.
Photo: CZ (first from right) takes a photo with early industry practitioners
Among them, BN is naturally a typical example of the explosive wealth effect. You should know that before BN was established in 2017, it was unknown and sought financing everywhere. After its establishment, it was even criticized for the BNB price falling below the issue price. BNB was launched in July 2017 with an issue price of 1 yuan, and then fell below the issue price, and the lowest price was halved to 0.5 yuan.
He Yi later recalled that this was the most stressful period for CZ, and he "lost 10 kilograms in three weeks." However, no one expected that only about half a year after its establishment, BN would quickly become the world's number one in trading volume, and then it would continue to grow rapidly.
In just 4 years, at its peak in 2021, some former BN executives valued the company at more than $300 billion, creating a large number of billionaires in addition to the founders.
In addition to the platform, the Miner field is also a booming derivative track. Take the founder of F2Pool, Shenyu, as an example. He started mining with a laptop in the dormitory in the early days, and later bought a graphics card to mine at home. Then he seized the opportunity of industry development and founded F2Pool in 2013. A 500 KW F2Pool once produced more than 20,000 BTC and more than 100,000 ETH.
As the beginning of the dream of the crypto world, the PoW mechanism tied the lives of miners to the development of BTC, making miners the most determined evangelists and defenders of Bitcoin, giving BTC extremely strong vitality, and also becoming the beginning of the madness in the crypto world - almost all of the early crypto giants and top companies came from the miner field.
From a handful of ten thousand coin holders to the widespread thousand coin holders and hundred coin holders today, from the approachable block production bosses (Shenyu, etc.) and platform bosses (CZ, etc.) 6 years ago to the "ordinary billionaires" today, in just a few years, the situation has changed dramatically.
Not long ago, Hurun released the 2023 Hurun Rich List, and many big names in the domestic crypto industry, such as Wu Jihan, Li Lin, and Xu Mingxing, were on the list:
Wu Jihan ranks 9th among the Peking University alumni on the list with 10 billion yuan; Li Lin ranks 3rd among the Tongji University alumni on the list with 7 billion yuan; Xu Mingxing ranks 16th among the Renmin University of China alumni on the list with 5 billion yuan.
Of course, the entire crypto industry has now passed its initial wild days, and it may no longer be realistic to expect to replicate the path of the big guys and get rich by participating in block production, providing block production machines, etc.
However, for ordinary investors like us, there are still many cost-effective options in the Web3 industry.
02
The best time was 10 years ago, the second best time is now
The most direct way is that in addition to producing blocks and hoarding tokens, the Airdrop form has emerged and become popular since the "DeFi Summer" in 2020.
This provides a new reward for participants who are keen on trying new things, and is also a unique way for the circle to earn large amounts of money in addition to operations such as hoarding tokens:
Uniswap (UNI) gave away an iPhone 12;
Meme (MEME) gave away a house;
Tokenlon (LON) sent a luxurious dinner;
The Graph (GRT) curator event gave away a house;
Including in 2023, Blur sent a total of 360 million BLUR to more than 62,000 addresses that met its Airdrop conditions. Among them, the single address that received the most received 3.2 million BLUR, which is worth more than 1.6 million US dollars, or 10 million yuan, based on today's market price.
In addition, although the wealth-creating effect of ARB, TIA, and JTO Airdrop is limited for a single address, there are also stories of people getting rich overnight by making money from multiple addresses.
For the Web3 industry in the past three years, practicing new products more often is not only to meet your own needs, but may also inadvertently lay the groundwork for unexpected surprises in the future.
Just as in "Fanghua", Zhizhenyuan makes money from the information gap, so the prosperity and decline of Zhizhenyuan and Huanghe Road are shared the same fate: as long as the information gap exists, the era of prosperity will be one in which horses will continue to run and martial arts will continue to dance, and with the end of the era of grass-roots, the most obvious feature is that the information gap is gradually being eliminated.
In the past 2023, Ordinals and memes, as the main narrative, are different from many previous large-scale investment and financing projects and the traditional narrative logic dominated by VC. They still provide possible opportunities for overtaking by more ordinary people other than OGs and whales.
In particular, the information about typing inscriptions and buying memes that filled the major WeChat groups once made people dream back to the zoo market of the past. In addition, spot ETFs have also added new variables to the entire industry:
As the main channel for incremental OTC funds to enter the market, everyone expects ETFs to bring in massive amounts of incremental funds, open up the way for traditional mainstream investors to invest in cryptocurrencies, and promote large-scale acceptance of Bitcoin and other assets by Wall Street as much as possible, so that crypto asset allocation can gain wider recognition.
You should know that the top applications in the Web2 world, whether it is Taobao or Amazon, easily have hundreds of millions or even billions of buyers, while the users of MetaMask, ENS and other top Web3 applications are only hovering in the tens of millions and millions, and the mainstream holders of BTC are even fewer.
From this perspective, the Web3 industry is still a 24/7 stage. After the spot ETF is approved, it will still be a niche market in the next few years. The incremental entry process is still full of opportunities. It is worth looking forward to what exciting dramas will be staged next.
03
summary
For me personally, the most impressive sentence in "Fang Hua" is what the uncle said to Bao Zong:
You know the Empire State Building in New York? It takes an hour to run from the bottom to the roof, but only 8.8 seconds to jump from the roof. This is the stock market. If you want to make money from stocks, you must first learn to lose.
Since 2017, especially after the DeFi summer of 2020, various types and colors have become the main narrative in the crypto world one after another - whether it is DeFi's golden shovel, or the sky-high price of NFT's small pictures, as well as the ups and downs of new public chains and the latest wave of Ordinals.
These rotating narratives continue to provide us, the general public, with new “counterattack legends” that tickle our nerves. This is both the norm in the crypto world and a sign that the “golden age” of Web3 has not yet ended.
Therefore, we in the Web3 industry must remember not to leave the table - "take the elevator if there is an elevator, climb the stairs if there are stairs". As long as we keep working hard on the field, one day, we will usher in a prosperous era that belongs to us alone.
