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 touch, some people say that the layout of the venue is strange and looks empty. Some people say that Vientiane is not well prepared, it is difficult to invite guests, and there is a shortage of project parties. Even the price of speaking on stage has returned to calm. Some voices are more like proving that I am still alive, not dead.
From what I see, the relationship between the East and the West is still a hot face against a cold butt.
There are obviously fewer Western faces in the field of web3 for three years (perhaps in more fields).
Even if Vitalik is present, apart from the fans’ group photos and social networking, the rest is the unilateral responsibility of some bald guys and those clowns who ruin 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, build more slot machines, lure more gamblers, and siphon the new results 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 yourself?
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, there are always more than half of the photos of fraud. When will the content keep up with the title they take?
RWA is the mainstream narrative this year, but is there any big difference in the underlying logic between it and NFT 3 years ago, inscription 2 years ago, and Meme 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 just a shell topic of the new macro perspective.
But in fact, grand narratives often ignore the rights of thousands of individuals without limit, just like a feeling of “everything is a straw dog”, and sometimes they are not even dogs, just numbers.
Of course, you can take off by seizing a mainstream narrative. Phantom seized the sol and meme airdrops, bitget seized the TG ecosystem, and took the multi-chain + annual narrative. Their annual growth is 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).
What can be done with the chain is still limited, and it is basically not a daily necessity. After hundreds of wallets, 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 **Web2 elite halo in the previous wave of narratives, **one after another “empowering the ecosystem” but never even using a wallet.
Interestingly, BTC’s event does 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 a chance to turn over.
3. Is V still okay?
What kind of conspiracy is more terrifying?
I think it is to turn 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 how you choose, it cannot be separated from 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 is such a young brain and vision, which brings unlimited growth potential.
But behind every characteristic are shortcomings
30 years old has 30 years old shortcomings, it is too easy to be surrounded by villains, too easy to fall into the honey of words.
In every speech at the venue, V bets on L2 completely, 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. He 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, welcome each project party to bring their own resources, and EF will give you all the titles you want.
But who gave these reasons to V? Why did it become his deep-rooted expansion direction?
If L1 itself is good enough, then why do we need the empty city of L2? What about the gap between L2?
EF will upgrade to the next stage and return to the L1 experience. 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 be a trap
Among the dozens of venues before and after this run, the web3 game venue is the most daring to speak. Perhaps because there are not many people, more insights after the grounding can be spoken in a down-to-earth manner.
My initial entry into the industry also came from the breaking of the circle of loot, Ashe and running shoes, but now everyone has woken up, players have woken up, and investors have woken up. What is not giving up is the obsession in the past.
Those who are still investing here can only comfort themselves: ecological position, defensive positioning, and cost considerations.
In the past, games had countless good reasons to become a good business. Even the game version number control 3 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 like a trap.
Because the dopamine incentive of the B circle is not as good as the inscription.
When playing inscriptions, who doesn’t wake up naturally at 6 o’clock and have difficulty falling asleep at 3 o’clock during the frenzy period? What game can have the purest incentive to get to the core and be more effective.
But they don’t attract new users to each other, they all use the game to guide the flow of high data to fool 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.
The currency circle should just do fi, not games.
And game companies regard 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 these 1 million spoiled users, those who don’t go on the chain don’t play, those who go on the chain only play with financial attributes, if you want to play with financial attributes, you might as well play with memes.
If you transfer external users from 0 education to the chain, you will find that there is no need? Who is willing to do the painful user education?
But the game itself is indeed a good business. Mihoyo has provided him with a 10% increase in total revenue even with peripherals, but the gross profit can reach 70%.
Now there is really no team in the market that can make full profits from games, and games, as a product that provides emotional value, will generate value even in the process, compared with many pure result value products 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, the game will continue to fool some investors who are still unwilling to give up.
600 million valid addresses, think this is the Internet in 1994, save more, the thicker the feces, the more fragrant the flowers.
4. Is the bear market coming?
In the past few years, we have seen relatively bearish but not the most bearish times, and we 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 are made, the harder it is to think calmly.
This conference has many faces as always, but the projects have changed 2-3 rounds. Although serial entrepreneurs are often ridiculed, they are more worthy of cherishing.
People who have seen the cycle know: the bear market is the opportunity for the Builder.
Only with years of experience in stepping on pits, it is now clearer what can survive.
The “enterprise blockchain” movement was widely regarded as a dead end, but with the emergence of L2s, this movement has been revitalized, and Soneium is a typical example.
The increasingly ineffective “decel” community, this community can roar about how immoral and bad various mainstream actors are, but it can’t really provide 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 truly widely used is stablecoins, and the corresponding trading pairs and markets.
Some people say that those without repeat purchases are all hard businesses, and they have to constantly find new users. In some scenarios, they also have to add long-term after-sales services, and they have to keep pestering old customers until they go bankrupt. In fact, high liquidity and lack of core retention are also hard businesses.
In these businesses, the biggest losses in this round are the new vulnerable groups: VCs, who used to give guidance to projects and get a hundred times the return on 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 when selling goods.
I dare not invest at all, and I lose money every time I invest. 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 is over. 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 line is still saying: “We accept it, as long as we don’t mess it up.”
In today’s market, institutions have taken over. 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, and the cooperation between institutions and entrepreneurs has just begun.
5. Where are the opportunities later?
It seems to be scolding, but those things that have been messed up should be criticized, and after the criticism, they will return to rationality. After all, these years are not all messy.
After the inscription storm, it started to be caught off guard, and what was left after half a year was the optimization of the infrastructure.
Today’s meme storm has also passed halfway, from gmgn to Axiom, **What is left is the product that understands the needs and is proficient in the technology at the bottom of the chain. **Many performances cannot be achieved to the extreme without mastering the underlying layer.
With the outbreak of Gmgn, which does not know how to share the cake, high-quality talents are forced to flow in the industry.
In terms of the crowd, 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, so that the talent base of the future industry is very solid.
In terms of direction, chain building has been disenchanted, and the direction of funds only running for large agreements has also changed. Although VC is more cautious at this time, the tool layer and application layer with a clear business model user group have ushered in the opportunity for objective evaluation.
Cryptography has reached a bottleneck, and the user’s operation object is also breaking the limit.
Because many behaviors in the real world cannot be proved by cryptography, and not all things can be solved by decentralization. The bottleneck of efficiency and technology is there, and each bottleneck is an opportunity. In the future, the irreconcilable gap between centralization and decentralization will not continue. There is only a concession from both sides.
Before there is a clear goal, what you need to do is to protect your attention, improve your ability to identify what is garbage, and stay in a good mood and live longer from the fluctuations of the cycle.
6. Finally
Some of my disappointments in this industry are true, which stems from the excessive expectations in the early days, and I completely regarded the term web3 as the scale of the next generation of infrastructure.
But now, if you 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 so far, your attention is precious. Don’t let other people’s gossip fill your life, otherwise when the information source of ordinary people is monopolized by Twitter KOL and abstract community, you will only become “consensus cannon fodder”.
What is really worth paying attention to is always those who become KOL by the way after doing their job to the extreme.
A good friend (@Odyssey_Leexixi) said:
Now, people no longer believe in all kinds of 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 dream rate to market share, I like this transformation very much, because this is what I have always wanted to do.
