Looking back at the past three years at the Hong Kong Carnival: fanaticism, disenchantment and transcendence

This is a short essay about the Hong Kong web3 carnival.

It may sound a bit harsh, but I want to talk about those things in the past and why they were falsified.

1. Is the Hong Kong web3 carnival cold?

Cold, this is also the first impression of many people. The previous conference was crowded and crowded, but this time it was almost all familiar project parties. The VIP room was empty and there were not many people coming to the exhibition. Where would the liquidity and creativity come from in the future? But there are more people wearing suits, and the underlying logic of the industry seems to be reconstructed.

From the source of the cold feeling, some people said that the layout of the venue was strange and it seemed empty, and some people said that Vientiane was not well prepared, it was difficult to invite guests, and there was a shortage of project parties, so that the price of speaking on stage returned to calm. Some voices seemed to prove that I was still alive, not dead.

From what I see, The relationship between the East and the West is still a warm face against a cold butt.

There are obviously fewer Western faces. For three years, in the field of web3 (perhaps in more fields).

Even if Vitalik came to the scene in person, apart from the fans' group photos and social networking, the rest were the unilateral responsibilities of some bald guys and those clowns who ruined the industry.

What is deeply rooted is the difference in culture and pursuit.

Those who only use the technical achievements of web3 as a casino, relying on the screenshots of pulling three bananas in each cycle, influence the overall direction to build more slot machines, lure more gamblers, and siphon the new achievements of builders. .

The collective appeal of the Western big public chains to the East is that at most you are a user, not a partner.

Is it that others don't play with you, or is there something wrong with you?

Or is it that what everyone pursues is not the same thing, and you still expect to play with each other? 2. Is RWA right? In every keynote speech, more than half of the speeches are fake. When will the content keep up with the titles they choose? RWA is the mainstream narrative this year, but is there any big difference in the underlying logic between it and NFTs from 3 years ago, inscriptions from 2 years ago, and Memes from 1 year ago? If you look closely at the underlying support of each cycle, you will find that once everything enters the macro perspective, it will eventually be correct and just.

RWA is nothing more than a new macro perspective.

But in fact, grand narratives often ignore the rights of thousands of individuals without limit, just like "everything is a straw dog", and sometimes they are not even dogs, just numbers.

Of course, you can take off by grasping a mainstream narrative. Phantom grasped the sol and meme airdrops, and bitget grasped the TG ecosystem, taking the multi-chain + annual narrative, and their annual growth was huge.

But it has never been difficult to grow in this industry, but it is difficult to retain (resources and momentum are in place, which will have a more flywheel effect than the growth explosion of traditional Internet).

The things that can be done with the chain are still limited, and they are basically not daily needs. After hundreds of wallets fought, even the hottest unisat last year has not been opened for a long time, and there is no need to open it, which only adds to the sadness.

RWA institutions are also encountering the PPT scams of the halo of Web2 elites in the previous wave of narratives, and people who keep talking about "empowering the ecosystem" but have never even used a wallet.

Interestingly, BTC events do not care about narratives, which is very promising. After all, people who chase narratives generally cannot catch up, and people who create narratives still have the opportunity to turn over.

3.Is V still okay?

What kind of conspiracy is more terrifying?

I think it is to make the essence of tragedy into a choice trap, whether it is burning self-destruction or decaying chronic suicide. The most terrifying thing is that no matter which path you choose, it will add shackles to the exploration of the other path.

V is already standing on a difficult choice question, and no matter what choice he makes, he cannot escape from personal tragedy or collective tragedy.

Admittedly, V is a genius, V's work effort is also the first in the industry, and V is also very young. If we talk about the future of Ethereum, the biggest opportunity is such a young brain and vision, which brings unlimited growth potential.

But behind any characteristic are shortcomings

30 years old has its shortcomings, too easy to be surrounded by villains, too easy to fall into the honey of words.

In every conference, V's speech is completely betting on L2, which is right, and there are a lot of logical reasons.

One ​​of the great reasons is that EF is best at on-chain, not off-chain. It has unlimited on-chain creations, but how to link to off-chain requires partners to do it, but EF can no longer share the cake, so why not treat itself as a platform and empty booths one by one, welcome each project party to bring their own resources, EF will give you all the titles you want.

But who gave these reasons to V? Why did they become his deep-rooted expansion direction?

If L1 itself is good enough, then why do we need L2's empty city? What should we do if there is a gap between L2?

The next stage of upgrade under EF will start to return to the L1 experience, and the biggest resistance will not come from L1 itself, but from L2s.

This is the current choice trap.

3.Web3+ games are not willing to give up, but they are a trap

Among the dozens of venues before and after this run, the web3 game venue is the most outspoken, perhaps because there are not many people, so more of the feelings after the grounding are spoken out in a down-to-earth way.

My initial entry into the industry also came from the breakthrough of loot, Ashe and running shoes, but now

Those who are still investing here can only console themselves:Ecological position, defensive positioning, cost consideration.

Games used to have countless good reasons to become a good business, and even the game version number control three years ago was an opportunity for the explosion of web3 games. The hardware requirements of games are naturally different from other financial scenarios, so the web3 game public chain has always been a direction of succession.

But from play to earn, onchain, tg game, it seems that they have all become traps.

Because the dopamine incentives of the B circle for making games are actually not as good as those of playing inscriptions.

When playing inscriptions, who doesn't wake up naturally at 6 o'clock and have difficulty falling asleep at 3 o'clock? What kind of game can have the purest incentive to get to the core and is more effective.

But they don't attract new users to each other, they all use the game to guide each other to make high data to deceive investors. They used to just falsify account data, and now they are even falsifying together with the audit. Even those who invest in web3 games don't play games themselves, they have only played Contra.

Just do fi in the currency circle, don't do games.

And game companies treat web3 as a new field to make games. From Perfect World to Korean game chaebols, to the Western metaverse narrative, they are all hanging in the wasteland left by the b circle making games.

All in all, these 1 million users have been spoiled. Those who don’t go on the chain don’t play, and those who go on the chain only play with financial attributes. Since they want to play with financial attributes, they might as well play memes.

If you want to educate external users from scratch and transfer them to the chain, you will find that there is no need? Who is willing to do the hard work of user education?

But the game itself is indeed a good business. Mihoyo even provides him with a 10% increase in total revenue from peripherals, but the gross profit of this piece can reach 70%.

There is indeed no team in the market that can make a full profit from games. As a product that provides emotional value, games can generate value even in the process, which is compared with many products with pure result value on the chain (such as the public chain that has been worked hard to build, but no one plays it and it completely loses its value).

Therefore, games will continue to fool some investors who are not giving up.

600 million valid addresses, think this is the Internet in 1994, save some more, the thicker the feces, the more fragrant the flowers.

4.Is the bear market coming?

In recent years, I have seen relatively bearish but not the most bearish times, and I have also seen the most breakthrough times. Every period of narrative confusion seems to be around the HK conference.

After last year's Bitcoin Asia, Inscription has been cold. Once the market cools, the pressure on the project side becomes greater. The more mysterious operations, the harder it is to think calmly.

This conference has many faces as usual, but the project has changed 2-3 rounds. Although serial entrepreneurs are often ridiculed, they are more worthy of cherishing.

People who have seen cycles know: bear market is the opportunity for Builders.

Only with many years of experience in stepping on pits, now it is clearer what can survive.

The "enterprise blockchain" movement was widely seen as a dead end, but has been revived with the emergence of L2s, Soneium being a prime example.

The increasingly ineffective "decel" community, which can rant about how various mainstream actors are unethical and terrible, but can't really offer better alternatives.

But these are pitfalls

DeFi was supposed to replace banks, NFTs were supposed to redefine ownership, and the metaverse was supposed to be the new gathering place for people. But after billions of dollars in promises, the only things that are really widely used are stablecoins, and the corresponding trading pairs and markets.

Some people say that businesses without repeat purchases are all hard, and they have to constantly find new users. In some scenarios, they also need to provide long-term after-sales services, and they have to keep pestering old customers until they go bankrupt. In fact, businesses with high liquidity and lack of core retention are also hard.

In these businesses, the new vulnerable groups have suffered the most in this round: VCs, who used to give advice to projects and get a hundred times the return for grabbing a good project, but now they are being cut by the project parties and rarely make money. After TGE, the project parties and market makers also make money first by selling goods.

They dare not invest at all, and they lose money for every investment. Rather than saying it is an industry problem, it is better to say it is an operation problem of the early project parties.

The era of relying on narrative to expand infrastructure has ended. Projects with high valuations and low circulation have no room for survival. All VC project valuation systems are being reconstructed, and old projects are being reshuffled.

In the new cycle, don't be too superstitious about policies.

Hong Kong has indeed changed a lot, but the bottom is still saying:"We accept it, as long as we don't mess it up."

Institutions have taken over the market today. It is no longer a situation that small entrepreneurial ideas can challenge. Either adapt to and learn this game, or be eliminated. It is not easy to dominate in a single direction. The cooperation between institutions and entrepreneurs to leverage each other has just begun. 5. Where are the opportunities behind? It seems to be scolding, but those things that have been messed up should be criticized, and then return to rationality. After all, these years are not all a mess. After the inscription storm, it was caught off guard. Half a year later, what was left was the optimization of the infrastructure. Today's meme storm has also passed halfway, from gmgn to Axiom, what is left is the products that understand the needs and the technology that is proficient in the bottom layer of the chain. Many performances are not proficient in the bottom layer and cannot be achieved to the extreme.

With the outbreak of Gmgn and other companies that do not know how to share the cake, high-quality talents are forced to flow in the industry.

In terms of the population, after entering the deep water area, a group of people have completed the popularization of user education, as well as the shift of scientific research in universities, making the talent base of the future industry very solid.

In terms of direction, chain building has been disenchanted, and the direction of funds only running towards large agreements has also changed. Although VCs are more cautious at this time, the tool layer and application layer with clear business model user groups have ushered in the opportunity for objective evaluation.

Cryptography has reached a bottleneck, and the user's operation objects are also breaking the limit.

Because many behaviors in the real world cannot be proven by cryptography, and not all problems can be solved by decentralization. The bottlenecks of efficiency and technology are there, and each bottleneck is an opportunity. In the future, the irreconcilable gap between centralization and decentralization will not continue. What will happen is that both sides will make concessions.

Before there is a clear goal, what we need to do is to protect our attention, improve our ability to identify what is garbage, and maintain a good mood and live longer from the fluctuations of the cycle.

6.Finally

I am really disappointed with this industry. This isdue to the excessive expectations in the early days, which completely regarded the term web3 as the scale of the next generation of infrastructure.

But now, if we only regard it as crypto finance 3, it will be much more rational.

Some attempts that are not related to crypto finance do not need to be paid attention to.

There is always such a group of people who pursue freedom in the world. It is good to make the best tools and facilities for these people.

Friends who have read this far, your attention is precious. Don't let other people's gossip fill your life. Otherwise, when ordinary people's information sources are monopolized by Twitter KOLs and abstract communities, they will only become "consensus cannon fodder."

The ones who are truly worth paying attention to are always those who do their job to the extreme and become KOLs by the way.

A good friend (@Odyssey_Leexixi) said:

Now, everyone no longer believes in all kinds of blown bubbles, which is also reflected in the venue. The low-hanging fruits have been picked, and everyone has turned to pursue product-market fit, making products that truly meet user needs, have cash flow, and have a business model.

From market share to market share, I like this transformation very much because this is what I have always wanted to do.