A Brief Discussion on Crypto Nihilism: Bitcoin and Web3 Are the Only Redemption Path for Our Generation

Author: NingNing

At this moment, it is just like that time.

Now, the breadth and depth of nihilism in the crypto industry is comparable to Q3 and Q4 of 2019. At that time, the crypto industry was caught in a cycle of Fomo3 D, EOS gambling D apps, and hyper-leveraged perpetual contracts, crazily squeezing the last drop of liquidity from the market. Practitioners lost faith and confidence, and the notion that "crypto = Ponzi" was rampant, with tail-end CEXs launching multi-level commission ambassador programs.

Back then, an OG brother personally told me that the entire crypto industry was over, advising me to "go straight." However, just 9 months later, DeFi Summer arrived amidst waves of skepticism and ridicule, completely reshaping the industry with "disruptive" innovation, and the "value internet" began to emerge.

As time flows and cycles rotate, the crypto industry seems to have fallen back into the quagmire of five years ago. The catastrophic beginnings of certain top-tier project tokens after their TGE have led to an unprecedented weariness and aversion in the market's collective psyche towards VC narratives. The vague concept of "value coins" has been intentionally or unintentionally created as a target for ridicule and insult, with irrationality, deconstruction, fragmentation, emotion, and noise dominating the entire crypto market like never before.

Some well-known VCs even proclaimed "Meme is king," catering to this market trend, extracting liquidity and profits from the irrational market structure. Although some VC leaders stood up to say "meme is not everything in crypto," it provoked a collective backlash from retail investors.

Little do they know that the meme craze on Solana is a deliberate strategy to capture the long-tail asset liquidity of the Ethereum mainnet. The wealth myths of those insiders and smart money are no different from the allure of lottery jackpots, serving as bait to lure retail investors into a series of inevitably negative EV PvPvP games. The eruption of memes on the Base chain is a choice that the Ethereum ecosystem must respond to.

Today, the market's attention and liquidity are being siphoned off by the protracted competition between the Ethereum and Solana ecosystems in the Web3 landscape. In addition to the aforementioned liquidity battle, Solana has also introduced new primitives like ZK Compression and Blinks, competing with Ethereum in scalability and Web3 social domains.

The smoke released from this war without gunpowder permeates the entire crypto market, obscuring everyone's vision and causing the market to overlook paradigm innovations at the edges of the crypto industry landscape, such as Dapp Rollup, chain abstraction, AI Oracles, AI Dapps, Consumer Chains, ZK co-processor networks, and the Bitcoin ecosystem. These paradigm innovations from the margins will disrupt and reshape the entire industry in the next innovation cycle, just like the last round of DeFi.

As an emerging technology, Crypto and Web3 obey the rules of the Gartner Hype Cycle, going through stages of technology emergence, expectation inflation, bubble burst, slow recovery, and stable maturity. During the expectation inflation phase, we must remain rational; during the bubble burst phase, we must also maintain rationality.

Recently, a tweet from Ethereum Foundation leader Peter lamenting his wrong career choice went viral. He compared the value of SpaceX engine iterations with the value of Web3 technology iterations, candidly criticizing our industry for lacking value creation over the years, only having value circulation.

He is right. However, the cultural and economic system he is in makes him less sensitive to the value of value circulation. For those of us in a non-free market environment, it is no exaggeration to say that the BTC and Web3 value networks are the only path to redemption for our generation.