This is a short essay about the Hong Kong web3 carnival.
The curse 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. In the past, the conference was crowded with people, 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 mobility 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.
As for the source of the deserted feeling, some people said that the layout of the venue was strange and it seemed empty, others said that Vientiane was not well prepared, it was difficult to invite guests, there was a shortage of project parties, and even the price of giving speeches on stage had returned to calm. Some voices seemed to be proving that I am still alive, not dead.
In my opinion, the relationship between the East and the West is still one of warm faces and cold butts.
There are noticeably fewer Western faces in the web3 space (and perhaps more) over the past three years.
Even if Vitalik were present in person, apart from fans taking photos and socializing, the rest would be the unilateral blame from some bald guys and other clowns who are ruining the industry.
Deeply rooted are differences in culture and pursuits.
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 users 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 dont want to play with me, or is there something wrong with me?
Or is it that what everyone is pursuing is not the same thing, yet they still expect to play with each other?
2. Is RWA right?
In every keynote speech, more than half of them are fake. When will the content be able to catch up with the titles they choose?
RWA is the mainstream narrative this year, but is there any big difference in underlying logic between it and NFT 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 shell topic from a new macro perspective.
But in fact, grand narratives often ignore the rights of thousands of individuals without limit, giving a feeling of everything is like straw dogs. Sometimes they are not even dogs, but just numbers.
Of course, you can take off by grasping a mainstream narrative. Phantom grasped the sol and meme airdrops, bitget grasped the TG ecosystem, and followed the multi-chain + annual narrative. Their annual growth was huge.
But achieving growth in this industry has never been difficult; what is difficult is retention (if resources and momentum are in place, there will be a more flywheel effect than the growth explosion of traditional Internet).
There are still limited things that can be done with chains, and they are basically not daily necessities. After hundreds of wallets fought, even last year’s most popular Unisat 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 experiencing the PPT scams of the Web2 elite halo in the previous wave of narratives, with people who keep talking about empowering the ecosystem but have never even used a wallet.
Interestingly, BTC’s events don’t care about narratives, which is very promising. After all, people who chase narratives generally can’t catch up, and people who create narratives still have a chance to turn things around.
3. Is V okay?
What kind of conspiracy is more terrifying?
I think the essence of tragedy is to turn it into a choice trap , either 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 facing a difficult choice, and no matter what choice he makes, it cannot escape personal tragedy or collective tragedy.
It is true that V is a genius and he works the hardest in the industry. He is also very young. If we talk about the future of Ethereum, the biggest opportunity lies in such young brains and visions, which bring unlimited growth potential.
But behind every feature there are disadvantages.
Being 30 has its own shortcomings: it’s too easy to be surrounded by villains and too easy to fall into the sweetness of words.
V completely bets on L2 in his speeches at every conference, which is very correct and has 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 them to off-chain requires partners. However, EF can no longer share the cake, so it might as well treat itself as a platform and empty out booths. Each project party is welcome to bring their own resources, and EF will give you all the titles you want.
But who gave these reasons to V? Why did they become his deep-rooted direction of expansion?
If L1 is good enough, then why is L2 empty? What should we do about the gap between L1 and L2?
The next stage of upgrade under EF will begin to return to the L1 experience. At that time, the biggest resistance will not come from L1 itself, but from L2s.
This is the current selection trap.
3. Web3+ games are a trap
Among the dozens of venues before and after this conference, I dare to speak the most at the web3 game venue. Perhaps because there were not many people, I was able to gain more insights from the conference and speak out in a down-to-earth manner.
I first entered the industry because of the breakthroughs of loot, Ashe and running shoes, but now everyone has woken up, the players have woken up, the investors have woken up, and what remains unrepentant is the obsession they once had.
Those who are still investing here can only console themselves with the following: occupying an ecological position, defensive positioning, and considering costs.
Games used to have countless good reasons to become a good business. Even the game license 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 for success.
But from play to earn, onchain, and tg game, they all seem to be traps.
Because the dopamine incentives provided by the B circle for making games are actually not as good as those for getting inscriptions.
When playing inscriptions, who doesnt wake up naturally at 6 oclock and have trouble falling asleep at 3 oclock? What game can have the purest and most effective motivation that goes straight to the core?
However, they do not attract new users to each other. They just use their games to divert traffic and create high data to deceive investors. They used to just falsify account data, but now they are even falsifying data together with the auditors. Even those who invest in web3 games do not play games themselves and have only played Contra.
Just focus on fi in the cryptocurrency circle, don’t make games.
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.
In the end, it is these 1 million users who have been spoiled. Those who are not on the chain don’t play, and those who are on the chain only play with financial attributes. If they want to play with financial attributes, they might as well play with memes.
If we start from zero and educate external users to join the chain, we will find that it is useless. Who is willing to do the hard work of user education?
But the game itself is indeed a good business. Even the peripheral products of MiHoYo have provided it with a 10% increase in total revenue, but the gross profit can reach 70%.
It is indeed difficult to find a 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 different from many products on the chain that have pure result value (such as a public chain that has been built with great effort, but loses its value completely if no one plays it).
Therefore, the game will continue to fool some investors who have not given up.
There are 600 million valid addresses. I think this is the Internet in 1994. Let’s save some more. The thicker the feces, the more fragrant the flowers will be.
4. Is the bear market coming?
In the past few years, we have seen relatively bearish but not the worst times, and we have also seen the most groundbreaking times. Every period of narrative confusion seems to be around the HK conference.
After last years bitcoin asia, inscriptions have been unpopular. Once the market cools down, the pressure on the project parties increases. The more mysterious operations there are, the harder it is to think calmly.
There were many faces at this conference as usual, but the projects have changed 2-3 times. Although serial entrepreneurs are often ridiculed, they are more worthy of being cherished.
Those who have seen cycles know that a bear market is an opportunity for builders.
Only with years of experience in pitfalls, I now know better what can survive.
The “enterprise blockchain” movement was widely seen as a dead end, but has been revived with the emergence of L2s, with Soneium being a prime example.
An increasingly ineffective “decel” community, one that can rant about how various mainstream actors are immoral and terrible, but can’t really offer any better alternatives.
But these are all pitfalls!
DeFi was supposed to replace banks, NFT was supposed to redefine ownership, and the metaverse was supposed to be a new gathering place for people. But after billions of dollars of promises, the only thing that is really widely used is stablecoins, and the corresponding trading pairs and markets.
Some people say that businesses without repeat purchases are all suffering. They have to constantly find new users, and in some scenarios, they also have 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 suffering.
In this business, the new vulnerable group has suffered the most in this round: VCs. They used to give advice to projects and get a hundred times return if they caught a good project, but now they are being sold at a loss by the project owners and rarely make money. After TGE, the project owners and market makers also make money first.
I don’t dare to invest at all, and I lose money every time I invest. Rather than saying it’s an industry problem, it’s more like an operational problem of the early project owners.
The era of relying on narrative to expand infrastructure is over. Projects with high valuations and low circulation have no room to survive. The valuation systems of all VC projects are being reconstructed and old projects are being reshuffled.
In the new cycle, dont be too superstitious about policies.
Hong Kong has indeed changed a lot , but the grassroots are still saying: We accept it, as long as we dont mess it up.
Institutions have taken over the market today. It is no longer a situation that small entrepreneurial ideas can challenge. Either adapt and learn this game, or be eliminated. It is not easy to dominate in one direction. The cooperation between institutions and entrepreneurs has just begun.
5. Where are the opportunities ahead?
It seems like scolding, but those things that have been messed up deserve to be criticized, and after criticizing, we can return to rationality. After all, these years have not been all a mess.
After the inscription incident, we were caught off guard, and half a year later what was left was the layer-by-layer optimization of the infrastructure.
The meme storm is now halfway through, from gmgn to Axiom, what remains are products that understand the needs and are proficient in the underlying technology of the chain. Many performances cannot be achieved to the extreme without proficiency in the underlying technology.
With the outbreak of Gmgn and other companies that don’t know how to divide the cake, high-quality talents are forced to flow within the industry.
In terms of the population, after entering the deep water area, we have completed the popularization of user education for a group of people, as well as the shift of scientific research in universities, making the talent base of the future industry very solid.
In terms of direction, the mystery of chain building has been dispelled, and the direction of funds heading only for large protocols has also changed. Although VCs are more cautious at this time, the tool layer and application layer with clear business model and user groups have ushered in the opportunity for objective evaluation.
Cryptography has reached a bottleneck, and the objects that users can operate on are also being limited.
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 every bottleneck is an opportunity. The insurmountable gap between centralization and decentralization will not continue in the future. What is left is for both sides to make concessions.
Before you have a clear goal, what you need to do is to protect your attention, improve your ability to identify what is garbage, and maintain a good mood and live longer from cyclical fluctuations.
6. Finally
Some of my disappointments in this industry are real, and they stem from the high expectations in the early days, when I completely regarded the coined term web3 as the scale of the next-generation infrastructure.
But now, it would be much more rational to just think of it as crypto finance 3.
There is no need to pay attention to some attempts that have nothing to do with crypto finance.
There will always be a group of people in the world who pursue freedom. It would be great 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 talk communities, you will only become “consensus cannon fodder.”
The ones who are truly worth paying attention to are always those who have done their job to the utmost and become KOLs by the way.
A friend (@Odyssey_Leexixi) said:
Now, people no longer believe in all kinds of bubbles, which is also reflected in the conference. The low-hanging fruits have been picked, and everyone is pursuing product-market fit, making products that truly meet user needs, have cash flow, and have a business model.
From market-to-dream rate to market share , I really like this transformation because it is what I have always wanted to do.
