By Paul Veradittakit
Compiled by: Block unicorn
Today’s blockchain is approaching the “good enough” stage.
Transaction costs have dropped to less than $0.01 per transaction, and Solana, Avax, Sei, Sui, and L2 after EIP-4844 are all expected to achieve this. On-chain throughput may be sufficient, and many blockchains claim to process 10-50K+ transactions per second (TPS), but this will only become a factor when the TPS limit is reached, which may not appear in the next 3-5 years. The path to a better user experience is now clearly visible through account abstraction and wallets such as Rabby, Zerion, and Backpack.
For the new L1 and L2 layers, it is already difficult to find differentiation. After achieving these basic threshold requirements, everything becomes a competition for attention and a community of "followers". The best example is religion, a model of a strong community of followers.
So, how can we become the next religion? How can we become the next BTC/ETH/SOL?
Every religion needs a leader
No one knows that ETH has a genius boy Vitalik, whose blog posts are regarded as the Bible. SOL has Anatoly, who argues with ETH geeks every day on Twitter.
The best example here is probably the most notorious LUNA, a controversial cult leader Do Kwon or DK (RIP) who laughs at every naysayer. Cardano (ADA) is another great example, he streams several times a week from sunny Colorado.
The leaders of blockchain have become legendary figures who pass on this ideology and description of future development in the form of white papers. When these legends or leaders die, the ideology becomes stronger. Satoshi Nakamoto is "dead", but the ideology of BTC is stronger than ever. If Vitalik dies, ETH will still exist and thrive as a decentralized world computer.
I find a problem with projects like big players, which is that there is no central figure to worship or rely on. This is also the reason why ETH's second layer (L2) is in trouble. They rely on the myth of ETH, but are followers of existing religions. Therefore, I think ETH L2 still needs strong marketing from centralized exchanges such as Base x Coinbase, because their community will not be as strong as L1.
Every religion needs a near-death moment and a resurrection
Jesus was crucified, but rose from the dead. BTC had its near-death moment in the Mt Gox hack, but then it made a miraculous comeback. ETH had 14% of ETH locked in contracts in The DAO hack (read about this hack in Who Stole $11 Billion in Ethereum? ), and then the community proposed to fork a new ETH chain, which recovered quickly and became stronger. SOL is closely tied to FTX, and when FTX fell, SOL fell from $35 to $9, and people saw them as the next LUNA. However, now we are seeing its recovery.
Breaking away from a near-death encounter that wiped out all but the most devoted supporters also forms the basis of your most hardcore followers.
LUNA fell, but never came back (but still has “Luna Classic” enthusiasts). FTM also fell, but it lacked a mythical figure who looked more like Andre Cronje (AC) than Michael Kong (CEO of FTM). Fortunately, other chains (unfortunately) have not yet suffered a near-death blow, as many of them are still too new, including the second layer (L2).
Make early believers rich, such as increasing their wealth a hundredfold
Price increases are the best business development strategy, you make people rich and they become your biggest supporters. Bitcoin grew over 200x between 2013 and 2018 for its early adopters, forming its core following. Ethereum grew about 40x between 2020 and 2022, making its ICO backers rich, a diverse group who chose Ethereum over hundreds of other ICO projects.
On the other hand, SOL has increased by about 100x in the last cycle, but most of it is held by venture capital firms rather than the community, so it does not have as much grassroots influence as ETH. Unexpected airdrops like JTO and PYTH enrich the Solana community, and those who staked 1 SOL received $10,000 in JTO. They make the little people who can only afford 1 SOL rich, instead of distributing it based on the amount of SOL staked, which benefits the rich. Note that most airdrops (or points for that matter) do not enrich the community, only unexpected airdrops do.
During the bear market, L2’s ARB and OP also conducted quite successful airdrops. This is clearly a positive feedback loop, where rising prices attract more enthusiastic supporters and attention, which in turn leads to another rise in prices.
From now on, I will be looking at how TIA can leverage the momentum from the airdrop and the subsequent 10x price action. Early Celestia developers can now get about $200k in airdrops. On the other hand, SEI screwed up their airdrop and lost early community members, but is now slowly rebuilding it. Aptos and Sui are also venture capital chains, so need a great airdrop strategy to win organic community support.
Building religious communities using memes and unique identifiers
You need memes that spread quickly and easily, even with monetary incentives. You need inside jokes so people feel like they belong to an exclusive club. You need people to blindly support a “greater cause” because they feel like they belong.
Nothing illustrates this better than the “laser eye” BTC geeks. For Ethereum, there are “.eth” X names. With SOL, people use “◎” or “.sol” — the way Solana is played, not many people use it. But now BONK, dogwifhat, Popcat, etc. lead the Solana culture. You also have 0xmert who basically lives on X and laughs at every Ethereum geek. AVAX has “🔺” X names, while OP and ARB use 🔴 and 💙 💛 instead.
Memes must grow naturally from the community, you can't force memes on the community. You can't just add an "Inu" to the end of a token and think it's a successful project (because Shiba Inu has the suffix Inu, many meme coins also add Inu to the end of their names, thinking they are successful memes). For example, "Solana inu" didn't become popular, but $BONK and $WIF did. The Base community did surprisingly well on $BALD, it was original and a little interesting, but unfortunately it ended up being a scam.
You need a charismatic leader with a strong narrative to kickstart the flywheel and lay the foundation for your followers. Then it becomes a positive feedback loop: early community → memes and culture → price increase → more community → more memes → price increase → more community.
The closest thing to a "religious community" I've seen outside of the profession is Berachain. These people just understand crypto humor and community. SEI has done quite well with multiple "Sei" puns, for example $SEIYAN The community even launched an ecosystem fund. Sui and Aptos are lacking in this regard, but I'm sure these will follow as the number increases.
A simple narrative or one-line dialogue as a rallying cry
To spread your religion, you need a simple sentence to sell it. BTC is "digital gold" and ETH is "the world computer". SOL is "parallel processing" or "ETH killer". Recently, some strong statements have emerged - "modular blockchain" led by Celestia, and "parallel EVM" by SEI and Monad.
It’s much easier to tell people you have a “parallel EVM” (still an EVM, but the chain runs faster) than to tell them EIP-4844 will reduce the data cost of Ethereum Rollups by introducing blobs submitted via KZG.
Summarize
The success of blockchain comes down to a strong community. A community of developers, speculators, and users. And the strongest community is religion.
With over 240 L1/L2s and only a handful of original applications, blockchain faces stiff competition for attention. Technology is no longer a differentiator. There’s a reason Blast doesn’t talk much about their tech stack (no one cares) and focuses on their community and yield.
I wrote this post because everyone loves to speculate on L1/L2 because there is a market premium (and it’s also the easiest narrative to understand when “investing in blockchain technology”). But I actually prefer to talk about real-world use cases.
So which L1/L2 will become the largest religions in the next cycle?
