The first time I heard about and participated in blockchain was around the end of 2017 or the beginning of 2018. At that time, I was working at a major Internet company. Thanks to the innate advantages of major Internet companies in being the first to try new technologies in their business and their relatively strong programmer atmosphere, I had the opportunity to come into contact with the blockchain relatively early. At that time, I often hung out with a group of programmer friends, and the most common topics I heard them talk about were: "Bitcoin", "Mining", "ICO", "Aircoin", etc.
I don’t come from a technical background, so what they said at the time was completely confusing to me. But because I come from a content background, my intuition tells me that blockchain is a very different technology.
So, I started reading the Bitcoin white paper and the Ethereum white paper. I remember clearly that one night I read the English white paper of Bitcoin 10 times but didn’t understand it. I only remembered one title: "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System". This title was This is deeply ingrained in my mind, and my intuitive feeling is three words: awesome!
This is where it all begins. Or to use a more popular term on the Internet today: the gears of fate begin to turn.
Interestingly, although I started to understand the blockchain from Bitcoin, I followed my friend’s advice and started playing with air coins. As you can imagine, I did not escape the fate of leek.
So at that time, my attitude towards blockchain was very contradictory. On the one hand, like many people, I think this is a new leek-cutting scam - in fact, looking back at that time, such a situation did exist; on the other hand, I think that at least Bitcoin's The idea is very new and indicates some possibility for the future.
From 2019 to 2020, I did not participate much in this industry. I was only understanding the development of this industry as a learner and observer. To this day, I still feel that “learner” and “observer” are the labels that best suit me.
2021: Immerse yourself in the beauty of Web3
If 2017-2018 was a "bridging" experience of blockchain, then 2021 can be said to be a year of "deep personal experience".
That year, I worked for a US dollar fund. Thanks to the platform advantages of VC work, it gave me more opportunities to learn about the development of front-end technology and emerging fields. Coincidentally, it was also this year that as the encryption market ushered in a bull market, "Web3" replaced blockchain and began to become a new narrative.
If I recall that bull market, what immediately comes to mind? There are several things that impressed me:
- In early 2021, Bitcoin reached a market capitalization of $1 trillion for the first time.
- Major companies like Tesla disclose their Bitcoin holdings.
- An NFT work "Everydays: The first 5000 days" by artist Beeple was sold for $69 million.
- Basketball superstar Stephen Curry spent $180,000 to buy a BAYC NFT. Yes, you read that right, $180,000.
- El Salvador passes a bill making Bitcoin legal tender.
- DAO - A new social organization model for Web3 is beginning to emerge.
Looking back now, in 2021, the entire sentiment in the Web3 industry that I have experienced is very high. This surge is reflected in:
Investment and entrepreneurship are booming
Because I am in the VC industry, I will have many opportunities to communicate with investors and entrepreneur friends. During the entire process, Web3 has always been a topic that will not be absent. At that time, I saw many investors begin to leave the traditional investment field and transform into Web3.
Not just investors, but entrepreneurs too. In traditional VC investment, high-level talents from large companies are often the first choice for investment. But that year, I also saw many outstanding talents from large companies begin to flock to the Web3 field to start businesses.
When I asked those investors and entrepreneur friends who have invested in Web3 about the reasons for choosing Web3. A common answer is: The Web3 industry is like the Internet in the 1990s. It is a blue ocean. The sooner you occupy the ecological niche, the more industry dividends you can obtain.
Stir-fried hot
In Web3, speculation is a common verb. Especially in a bull market, speculation is indispensable.
- Speculating on currencies, especially speculating on contracts. If you look purely at the K line, the growth rate of the entire crypto market in 2021 will be very sharp. So at that time, on social media, you could always see many people posting their transcripts of huge profits and sharing their experiences on how to make money easily in the crypto market. This kind of information appears almost every day. Reading too much will give people the illusion that it is particularly easy to make money in this industry. No matter what your professional background or education is, if you add leverage in the bull market and are brave enough, everyone can easily make money. Get money.
- Speculate NFTs. In 2021, the most topical topic is undoubtedly NFT. In particular, BAYC's emergence has converted a large number of Web2 users. At that time, the greatest value of NFT, apart from hype, was as an avatar. If your social media avatar is a BAYC or CryptoPunk, then congratulations, many people will regard you as an OG or a particularly powerful person, because usually people who own this kind of NFT are either rich or wealthy. card face. It can be said that NFT very specifically satisfies the satisfaction of showing off in human nature. So at that time, many people around me were speculating on NFT, especially some young friends. Since many NFT castings are not based on East Eighth District time, if you want to cast an NFT that you like and has a high price, you have to stay up late and wait. At that time, the industry nicknamed NFTs as small pictures. As for the behavior of speculating on NFTs, an industry slang is: Are you sick today?
DAO practice is hot
Until now, I still feel that the emergence of the word DAO in 2021 is a very valuable thing. Because the word DAO means decentralized autonomous organization, compared to asset speculation activities such as currency speculation and NFT speculation, the tokenization hype of DAO is relatively less and more about exploring a completely different organizational model than the traditional one. Different organizational forms, such an organizational form has three very important characteristics: ① Decentralization, there is no so-called distinction between leaders and subordinates; ② Collaborative work based on consensus and democratic rules of procedure; ③ Remote working, tasks Completed through online collaboration.
Of course, like the path of the rise of many things, DAO was the first to become popular abroad. The familiar DAOs include: Bankless DAO (aimed at promoting the large-scale application and social consensus of a truly de-banked financial system), Pleasr DAO (composed of digital artists and collectors aiming to acquire works of cultural significance), ConstitutionDAO (raising funds to bid for copies of the U.S. Constitution), etc. Later, the DAO organization also took root in the country and some experimental DAO organization projects emerged.
Just like the hype of NFT, young people are the main group participating in DAO organizations. They are more receptive to new things. At the same time, many young people at that time called themselves "digital nomads", and organizational methods like DAO were more suitable for their digital nomad lifestyles.
Looking at 2021, of course I will inevitably be affected by the Web3 bull market craze. My feelings about Web3 in 2021 can be summed up in one word - immersive looking up. This kind of immersive admiration comes from the high level of technology represented by this industry - Web3 integrates new technologies such as cryptography, distributed ledgers, and smart contracts. It also comes from the fact that this industry seems to be easier to make money than other industries. The method comes from the emergence of new organizational forms like DAO, exploring the possibility of new organizational forms and new forms of collaboration in human society in the future.
If I could sum it up in one sentence, it would be: in a bull market, everything is beautiful.
2022: From looking up to calmness, changes always come at lightning speed
If we say that in the bull market of 2021, everything is beautiful. Well, 2022 will be a great year for the crypto market.
There have been so many historic events that can be remembered in the crypto industry this year:
- In May 2022, the public chain Terra suffered a thunderstorm, and Luna tokens returned to zero overnight.
- In July 2022, Three Arrows Capital, the top investment fund in the crypto industry, filed for bankruptcy protection.
- In November 2022, it was revealed that the top exchange FTX had a problem of misappropriating user funds. From the discovery of the problem to the declaration of bankruptcy, the entire process only took a few days.
Although this year, there are still some positive events that can give people comfort, such as the Ethereum consensus mechanism completing the transition from PoW to PoS. However, the occurrence of the above-mentioned events can be said to be the darkest moment in the history of the encryption industry, and directly set the tone of "depression" for the Web3 industry in 2022.
I no longer hear those encouraging and emotional messages, but instead hear more disappointing and terrible voices: XXX suffered heavy losses in currency speculation, XXX withdrew from the circle, XXX project stopped operations because it failed to raise funds, XXX Crypto funds are no longer investing. No one is discussing which currency is worth speculating on, and no one is discussing whether NFT will continue to rise (on the contrary, everyone is selling it, but because NFT liquidity is so poor, many NFTs are basically lost in their hands), no one is discussing When discussing what DAO should do next, no one is discussing how to mass adoption in this industry. The entire industry has become quiet, or to use the word I mentioned above, the entire industry has become depressed.
Like many people, after witnessing and experiencing so many thrilling and ups and downs of industry events, I also began to break away from the mood of looking up to Web3 in 2021 and slowly became calmer:
On the one hand, the huge fluctuations in the crypto market have shown me that people who set foot in this field not only have the ecstasy of getting rich overnight, but also the regret of huge losses overnight. Especially for those who increase leverage and speculate on contracts as spot goods, they regard Web3 as a fateful place to "turn a bicycle into a motorcycle".
On the other hand, the opaque use of funds and lack of effective supervision exposed by this industry have really undermined people’s confidence in this industry. Although for a long-term development thing, the sooner such a problem occurs, the better, but it does pour cold water on an excited mood, allowing everyone to start to look at Web3 objectively and calmly.
Finally, for those attempts that in my opinion have more social value, such as further exploration and discussion of the DAO model, such as promoting charity and environmental protection through tokenization, they did not make great progress this year, but followed the encryption The trend of the market industry has fallen into silence.
For a while, I have been thinking about a question: Why will there be so many new people entering the circle in 2021? I think media like NFT plays a big role because it expands the application scenarios of Web3 (even if it is just as an avatar), allowing more Web2 people to intuitively experience NFT and Web3. The problem is that when everyone comes into contact with NFT, they will immediately realize that it is an investment/speculative product. So overall, the integration of Web3 with real-life scenarios is weak, and the core is still on asset attributes or financial attributes - creating more tokenized financial derivatives to attract and enhance the liquidity of capital, and generate more Investment and speculation possibilities. So at that time, I thought that if Web3 really wanted to develop as an industry in the long term, it had to strike a balance between financial speculation and application scenarios.
2023: Markets are recovering, but there’s no going back to the past
After experiencing the bear market in 2022, 2023 can be said to be a year of self-healing for the crypto community. This year, the price of Bitcoin began to slowly climb from US$16,000 per coin at the end of 2022, and mainstream exchanges including Binance began to increase investment in promoting compliance operations. But when I chatted with some friends who invested in the first-level project, they chose to configure the second-level project or continue to wait and see. As a friend said to me at the time, "Now that the prices of mainstream coins in the secondary market are so low, why invest in primary projects with high uncertainty?"
At the same time, I originally thought that as the market slowly recovered, the discussion on Web3 on social media would become heated again. I remember that during the bull market in 2021, a large number of people interested in Web3 gathered on a niche social platform. In the circle of Web3 Research Institute, if you post an update, you will receive a lot of likes. But when I opened this social software again in 2023, I found that some people or projects that were often active in the past had stopped posting updates, and some new posts had almost zero likes and comments. It seems like nothing can go back to the past.
So this year, I began to consciously communicate with many people, including people outside the circle, people who have just joined the circle, and players who are experienced in playing DEFI and MEME. When I asked them what they thought of Web3, I got the same answer. The answer: Web3 is a casino that cuts leeks. The key depends on who is the leeks.
Based on the feedback I got from communicating with them, I began to have the idea of publishing a book. I hope to give more people an objective introduction to the development status of Web3 at that time, so that myself and those who want to understand and enter this field can pay attention to Web3, and It is not about putting a subjective good or bad bias on this field. Therefore, more than a dozen friends in the circle and I, who all have profound professional backgrounds and knowledge accumulation in their respective fields, jointly published a popular science book on Web3 "From Technology to Application: A Web3 Learning Manual for Ordinary People". It will be officially published at the end of 2023 and has received praise from many people. Looking back now, although it has only been half a year, the chapter system and framework in the book are far from enough to cover the current status of Web3 development. I admit that my mentality towards this industry has changed a lot, but what remains unchanged is that this industry still develops rapidly according to its own unique rhythm.
2024: The bull market is back, is Mass Adoption still far behind?
For now, a bull market in 2024 is a sure thing. This year, two major events have become catalysts for the rising prices of crypto assets: First, the U.S. SEC approved the issuance of Bitcoin spot ETFs, which means that more and more Wall Street funds will flow into Bitcoin, directly Push up the price of Bitcoin and even other crypto assets; secondly, Bitcoin will experience a halving cycle. Judging from historical experience, every Bitcoin halving will promote a bull market, and this year will most likely be no exception.
Based on my own observations, I also compared this bull market with the bull market in 2021 to see what remains unchanged and what has changed.
What remains unchanged is:
- The bull market amplifies the power of speculation: NFT is a speculative product in 2021, and MEME currency becomes a unique speculative product in 2024. In my opinion, there is no right or wrong in asset-related speculation. After all, the traditional stock market also has short and long positions. It’s just that the crypto market is too volatile and lacks effective supervision. Therefore, in a bull market, when the speculative games of each participant are aggregated into K lines, they will be infinitely amplified.
- Tokens still need to have better liquidity and the ability to make money: In addition to NFT, GameFi and SocialFi are also attention-grabbing tracks in the 2021 bull market. The unique tokenization attribute of Web3 needs to rely on specific tracks or businesses to better realize the flow of tokens and create more assets. The same goes for 2024. On the one hand, the Bitcoin ecology has begun to be constantly hyped. From inscriptions to runes to Bitcoin Layer 2, Bitcoin re-pledge protocol, etc., Bitcoin has gone through almost the same process that Ethereum has experienced; on the other hand, based on Ethereum The re-pledge project has become a hot topic. Since Ethereum transformed from POW to POS and generated pledges in 2022, what everyone wants today is far from the income from pledges, but how to continue to improve the efficiency of fund utilization on the basis of pledges. Get higher profits.
What changes is:
The path to Mass Adoption becomes diverse. In 2021, everyone pinned Web3's Mass Adoption mission on games, social networking and other projects, but the results did not meet expectations. In 2024, Web3 and AI will increasingly be combined, and will also begin to be combined with offline physical infrastructure to shape another narrative DePin. It is hoped that "saving the country through curves" can achieve the goal of Mass Adoption. From this perspective, Web3 needs AI or the Internet of Things more than AI and the Internet of Things need Web3. In addition, in my opinion, the passage of Bitcoin spot ETF, the acceptance of crypto asset donations for the US presidential election, etc., have shown that crypto assets have become mainstream, but this is a Mass Adoption that everyone can have, not a mass adoption that everyone can have. Mass Adoption is required for both.
The importance of MEME culture in Web3 is further highlighted. In Web3, a world that advocates decentralization, I believe that believing and safeguarding what you believe in is a spiritual core, and MEME is a direct expression of the native spiritual core of Web3. This is enough to explain why in this bull market, the growth rate of MEME coins will be better than that of other Altcoin.
After experiencing two rounds of bull markets from 2021 to 2024, as I said before, I have changed from looking up at Web3 at the beginning to looking up at it now. In my opinion, Web3 is when a person or a group of people "sells" an idea or vision and raises funds from the public. People who agree and participate receive token incentives. In order to make the tokens useful or liquid, they are given financial attributes. . To put it simply, it is a consensus of a group of people put on a financial cloak, and then they are constantly looking for utility scenarios empowered by tokens.
Conclusion: How to gain a better foothold in Web3
The above is my understanding of Web3. As mentioned at the beginning, I regard myself as a learner and observer in this field, so during the past two years of in-depth participation and personal experience, I have had many opportunities to communicate with friends and practitioners in the industry, and I have discovered many Everyone will face a common problem, that is, when we choose Web3 as the field of future development, how to gain a better foothold in this field?
This question varies from person to person, as everyone will have a different answer based on their own experiences and feelings. I can’t call myself a Crypto native because more of my working experience is in Web2, and I don’t have long-term experience in well-known Web3 projects or investment institutions, so it’s hard to say that I have any successful results (although my personal investment rate of return is Not bad), but fortunately, in the past two years, I have met many practitioners in the industry and learned a lot of experience. I would like to share my comprehensive views based on my own experience and the experience of my friends:
- Don't enter this circle with the mentality of speculating on currencies. This industry seems to have many opportunities to make money, but in fact there are not that many. I have heard a saying before that there is a pyramid model for making money in this field. The first is to work on projects or market; the second is to make VC investments; the third is to be a trader of arbitrage and quantitative strategies; the fourth is to go through Invest in research and make investments; the fifth is to hoard coins. My own experience is that those participants who frequently speculate in currencies may not necessarily have a high rate of return. On the contrary, traders who engage in arbitrage and quantitative strategies and investors who foolishly hoard mainstream currencies will have a stable rate of return. The former is due to professional capabilities, while the latter is due to the belief that mainstream currencies like Bitcoin have long-term value that can transcend bull and bear cycles. Therefore, in Web3, for most people, having a sustained and stable rate of return is far better than frequently speculating in currencies to achieve high risks and high returns.
- Treat people with the utmost kindness. Web3 is a relatively mixed field. Because everyone has different purposes for entering the field, and because many communications and collaborations are based on virtual online methods, the cost of trust in people or projects is relatively high. If you've found a team that you can work with for the long term, congratulations, you're in luck. If you haven't found it yet, that's okay. In the process of communicating and trying with different people, although you will encounter some disappointments, in this experience you will find like-minded partners to do something with you. The more you are in a field with high liquidity and high trust costs, the more you should judge people with the greatest goodwill.
- Do Your Own Research. This is the most widely circulated sentence in Web3, and it is recognized as a very valuable suggestion. Because there are all kinds of people, speeches, opinions and information in this field, when we judge people with the greatest goodwill, the more we need to form our own independent thinking and judgment in the dazzling environment, so as to form our own thinking models and professional investment methodologies. Please remember, don’t be kidnapped by emotions, don’t be kidnapped by other people’s CX, everything needs DYOR.
I write this article to some extent to summarize the changes in my understanding of Web3 over a period of time. Because this field has provided me with a better investment rate of return than other traditional investment varieties, and it has also allowed me to meet many different people, including real industry builders, powerful traders, and some who want to start a business in the short term. This is an interesting thing for opportunists. More importantly, through personal experience in this field, I also realized my ecological niche in this field and how to stick to some of my principles.
Of course, these are all based on my own personal experiences and feelings and are not universal. I believe that everyone in this field will have their own knowledge, understanding and feelings about Web3. I hope everyone can make money and find an ecological niche that suits them.
