Author: Terry, Vernacular Blockchain
The recently completed "Flowers" has set off a whirlwind in the investment market. It also made many people start to discuss Shanghai in the 1990s, especially the Yellow River Road and the capital market under the Shili Foreign Market. It was not only the golden age of Abao, but also reflected the true microcosm of many small figures in society in the changing trends.
In fact, this is true for many industries - in the early days, there were blooming flowers, blazing fire, wealth, and opportunities everywhere. However, as the rough development stage fades away, the good days gradually become Great memories and the dilemma of things returning to normal.
"What we love is not "Flowers", but the era of opportunities."To a certain extent, the Web3 industry in the past 10 years is equivalent to the stock market in the 1990s. , so now with the passage of the spot Bitcoin ETF and the Web3 industry continuing to move closer to the mainstream, has the "blooming era" of the crypto world come to an end?
01 The prosperous years of the encryption world
I believe that many friends in the encryption industry We have all thought about it, if we had the opportunity to go back 10 years ago, how would we participate in this wave of the times?
Stock BTC? Be a Miner? Establish another Bitmain? Or become an early employee at BN? There seem to be countless choices, nothing more than the last ten years of the crypto world. It was truly a golden age that pushed the limits of imagination, and also gave birth to waves of industry legends and myths about big names.
Picture: CZ (first from the right) took a group photo with early practitioners in the industry
Among them, BN is naturally a model of the explosive wealth effect. You must know that before the establishment of BN in 2017, when it was raising funds, it was once unknown and looked everywhere. Financing, after it was first established, it was even criticized for the failure of BNB - BNB was launched in July 2017 with an issue price of 1 yuan, and then fell below the issue price, with the lowest price being halved to 0.5 yuan.
He Yi later recalled that it was the most stressful period for CZ, "I lost 10 kilograms in three weeks." But what no one expected was that BN quickly achieved this in just about half a year after its establishment. The number of transactions ranked first in the world, and it has continued to grow rapidly since then.
In just 4 years, by the peak period in 2021, some former BN executives have valued the company at more than US$300 billion. In addition to the founders, they have also created a large number of Billionaire.
In addition to the platform, the Miner field is also a booming derivative track. Take Shenyu, the founder of Yuchi, as an example. From the early days of mining in the dormitory with a laptop, he later bought a graphics card to work in the field. I dug at home, and then in 2013, I seized the opportunity of industry development to create a fish pond. At one time, a 500 KW fish pond produced more than 20,000 BTC and more than 100,000 ETH.
As the beginning of the dream of the crypto world, the PoW mechanism bound Miner’s life and fortune to the development of BTC, making Miner the most determined evangelist and defender of Bitcoin, giving BTC extremely strong The vitality of Miner also became the beginning of craziness in the encryption world - almost most of the early encryption giants and leading companies came from the Miner field.
From a handful of people with ten thousand coins to now everywhere Qianbihou and Baibihou, from the block production bosses (Shenyu, etc.) and platform bosses (CZ, etc.) who were approachable 6 years ago, to today's "approachable people" today, in just a few years, Today is different from the past.
Not long ago, Hurun released the 2023 Rich List. In the domestic encryption industry, Wu Jihan, Li Lin, Xu Mingxing and other big names were on the list: p>
Wu Jihan ranked 9th among the alumni of Peking University with 10 billion yuan; Li Lin ranked 3rd among the alumni of Tongji University with 7 billion yuan; Xu Mingxing ranked 3rd among the alumni of Renmin University of China with 5 billion yuan Alumni No. 16.
Of course, today’s entire encryption industry has passed the initial rough days, and is counting on re-enacting the trajectory of the big guys to achieve success by participating in block production, providing block production machines, etc. Being rich may no longer be realistic.
However, for us ordinary investors, there are still many cost-effective options in the Web3 industry.
02 The best time was 10 years ago, followed by now
The most direct thing is that in addition to production In addition to blocks and tokens, the Airdrop form has emerged and become popular since the "DeFi Summer" of 2020.
This provides a new reward for participants who have a keen sense of smell and are willing to try new things. It is also a large income unique to the circle in addition to operations such as hoarding tokens:
Uniswap (UNI) gave away an iPhone 12;
Meme (MEME) gave away an apartment;
Tokenlon (LON) gave away a luxurious dinner;
The Graph (GRT) curator activity gave away a suite;
Including Blur in 2023, which sent a total of 360 million BLUR to more than 62,000 addresses that met its Airdrop conditions, among which the most received A single address received 3.2 million BLUR, which is over 1.6 million US dollars, or 10 million yuan, based on today's market price.
In addition, although the wealth creation effect of ARB, TIA, and JTO Airdrop is limited with a single address, There are also many stories of people getting rich by masturbating their hair.
For the Web3 industry in the past three years, the practice of new products is not only to meet one's own needs, but may also inadvertently lay the groundwork for unexpected surprises in the future. Grass snake gray line.
Just like in "Flowers", Zhizhenyuan makes money from poor information, so the prosperity and decline of Zhizhenyuan and Huanghe Road share the same breath and fate: as long as information The gap is still there. In the era of flowers, it was all about running and dancing, but with the end of the era of grass, the most obvious feature is that the information gap is gradually being smoothed out.
In the past 2023, Ordinals and memes, as the main narrative, are different from many previous large-scale investment and financing projects and the traditional narrative logic dominated by VC, and still provide more opportunities for OG and whales. Possible corner overtaking opportunities for the general public.
Especially the inscriptions and meme messages that flooded major WeChat groups once reminded people of the zoo market back in the day. In addition, spot ETFs have also added new variables to the entire industry:
As the main channel for incremental over-the-counter funds to enter the market, everyone expects ETFs to It will bring a huge amount of incremental funds, open up the path for traditional mainstream investors to invest in cryptocurrencies, and try to promote the large-scale acceptance of Bitcoin and others by Wall Street, making crypto asset allocation more widely recognized.
You must know that the top applications in the Web2 world, whether it is Taobao or Amazon, easily have hundreds of millions or even billions of buyers, while users of MetaMask, ENS, etc., which are the top applications of Web3, are only around. At the tens and millions levels, there are even fewer mainstream holders of BTC.
From this perspective, the Web3 industry is still a 24/7 stage. After the adoption of spot ETF, it will still be a niche market in the next few years. The incremental entry process is still full of opportunities, and it is worth looking forward to what exciting dramas will be staged next.
03 Summary
For me personally, the most impressive sentence in "Flowers" is, What Uncle Gui said to Mr. Bao:
You know the Empire State Building in New York? It takes an hour to run from the bottom to the roof, but it only takes eight and eight seconds to jump from the roof. This is stocks. If you want to make money from stocks, you must first learn to lose.
Since 2017, especially after the DeFi summer of 2020, in the crypto world, all kinds of things have become the main narrative one after another - whether it is the golden shovel of DeFi or the sky-high price of NFT Small pictures, as well as the ups and downs of new public chains and the latest wave of Ordinals.
These rotating narratives continue to provide us ordinary people with new "counterattack legends" and stir up our nerves. This is not only the norm in the encryption world, but also the "golden age" of Web3 A sign that the end is not yet over.
Therefore, we in the Web3 industry must remember not to leave the poker table - "There are elevators to take the elevator, and there are stairs to climb the stairs." As long as we continue to work hard on the field, one day we will usher in A flowery era that belongs to oneself.