The Eastern Crypto Community Can’t Always Be a Meme, It Needs a Wildfire

Author: Jocy, founder of IOSG, source: Twitter @JinzhouLin

I just happened to see the story of Tian Xing Jian 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 who were willing to risk being beheaded to follow Emperor Guangxu, and advocated the new law that was ahead of the times for hundreds of years within the dynasty, learning from the barbarians to control the barbarians, regardless of personal safety, and advocating the study of Western reform laws. 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 cheering and saying that they have been suffering from the "Western powers" for a long time, but in fact, they are using the left hand to restake nesting dolls for mining, and the right hand to rush the liquidity pool, and constantly posting memes/dogs on Twitter. Everyone knows the crux of the problem, but they all compromise with the current interests. The Eastern and Western crypto communities are currently in a frenzy 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 ideals. 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 winning the prize for latecomers 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 continuously 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. 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 or even lead the mainstream Western protocols.

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 Eastern and Western entrepreneurs: 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 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 schedules 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 50 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 leaders, but they still need more support and positive feedback from the community. The Eastern community should be more united and powerful, spend time discussing how to learn from the barbarians and face up to how to support a stronger Eastern mysterious community. When the community and entrepreneurs reach a consensus, the protocol will also bring more positive feedback.

IOSG, as a fund originating in Asia, will invest and support more Chinese entrepreneurs in this cycle to help them better enter the Western market and become mainstream. You can't imagine that in three to five years in this industry, the mainstream of this industry is still meme. When we are in the wave of the crypto era, everyone will inevitably become a trend-setter. Everyone is also very small under the footnotes 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 mined and explored, and these are the real industry alphas.