From Hong Kong to Denver Ethereum is entering the “Dunkirk Moment”

Author: Jocy@IOSGVC, source: Author Twitter@jocyln003

I believe you have seen many records of Consensus HK in the past two weeks. I will not repeat them anymore. I can summarize most of them as disappointed in the industry and cannot see the prospect of breaking the situation, and think that it has reached a bear market.That week was also a feast for young players and KOL masters. The impact of my trip to Hong Kong was reasonable. Those young players and masters who work harder than funds and entrepreneurs deserved to get so much, and they are surreal investors. They can always put a perfect end to every transaction. The trading principle of many young players is 90% or BTC, and 10% active sol positions maintain PVP and sprint at any time. No matter how much profit they make, they will implement such position allocation.Because of the meme wave and attention economy, this has become the most lively discussion in HK.

Kaito’s victory gave KOLs their golden age, with attention being priced and able to be quickly cashed in.In sharp contrast, the entire Ethereum ecosystem has no vitality and no one follows the clarion call of hollowing out idealism. This is a heavy blow to reality.The so-called value investors are deeply trapped, and long-term holders have begun to bearish Ethereum and turn to Solana. Many people cannot see the degree of Hungry of Ethereum entrepreneurs (in contrast, when a dev goes to find L2/Ethereum, it takes an average of two weeks to establish a connection, and it generally does not take two days to complete docking and grouping and start communication with the sol foundation). This seems to be the master of the crypto industry deliberately doing it. In this small cycle of bull market, long-term holders are not encouraged, but to give good returns to short-term traders, but in my opinion, this is for industry leaders such as Ethereum inaction or lacks crisis awareness, and the market is sounding the alarm for it.

Short-termism prevails: industry values ​​collapse and music

At the same time, when everyone takes off their disguise and wants to make a big fortune when the bull market is over, many people begin to have no ideals/convictions and become ruthless arbitrage tools. No one cares about the future of the industry, and everyone wants to make the last money in this cycle.In order to support their own project currency prices and chains, the exchange can give up the listing standard and list some projects they invested in; the king-level projects regard TGE as the last ATM, and market makers have become the ever-winning generals of this cycle. With BD and brands, they can always get chips for free and in the overall VC currency downward market, the average median volume of mm can get a net income of nearly 40m; it seems that everything is moving from long-termism to short-term bubbles and speculativeism, and the practices of these people are more profoundly affecting some entrepreneurs who insist on building them.

Such moments are very similar to those in 2018/2022, very deserted, and practitioners leave because they do not see hope and recognition in the industry.Everyone is trying their best to survive in a bear market.Teams who are still starting businesses and doing things will be painful for them, and they need firmness and values ​​all the time.Trump has influenced the core values ​​of the entire United States, and the crypto industry has inspired huge nihilistic investmentism after Trump token.Practitioners and speculators think this is a fast and short-term game, and everyone also aims at how much cash can be taken before the money game button is pressed.

To sum up the trip to Hong Kong, it was a major industry collapse and a formal written trial of Ethereum. As the most successful entrepreneur in the industry, did he grasp the bow of the industry? Was he the one who led the industry towards nihilism?

Challenges and transformation of the Ethereum ecosystem

Too long to read the version: Denver infra’s founder is very bearish, but the application and AI founder are very bullish.

Denver’s trip still saw many shocking scenes. Founders and developers who have been building steadily for many years, some of them were suddenly told that the Qing Dynasty was about to perish. They chose not to believe this. It seems that the Ethereum ecosystem has always had a culture of organizing the company. They have raised funds smoothly all the way, and they have also seen many projects that are not as good as theirs have achieved good performance in the token speculative market. They may never have thought that one day, they would not be able to raise money and the coins they issued would be the same as other air coins.When runway only had the last 6 to 9 months left, it was slow to understand that it was necessary to truly build a product with revenue and user base, and began to seriously think about what the problem of Ethereum was.Of course, it has never been too late. It just needs to make drastic layoffs and a complete denial of their past self. This is a huge challenge for the founder, because he is just betting on an uncertain direction, but he has to pay all his wealth for it.According to incomplete statistics, the current financing amount of projects deeply cultivated and built on the Ethereum and EVM ecosystems exceeds hundreds of billions of US dollars, and the overall valuation of the primary and secondary markets exceeds trillions of US dollars. Therefore, the question facing these projects is, whether to continue to stay in Ethereum or leave?As strong as Lido founder Konstantin, when he announced on Twitter that he wanted to establish the Second Ethereum Foundation, he instantly received hundreds of DMs (including Uniswap) from founders such as Ethereum Eco-defi. Of course, this is still very challenging to the consensus.

In addition, I met a wave of Ethereum ecosystem entrepreneurs. In the past, they have always been the backbone of the industry’s technology school. The technical products and solutions they have made have been widely adopted. Whether it is TEE/zkTLS/rollup, they are the dominant ones, but these people are also tired of it. No matter how good the solution is to provide technical agreements without end users and needs, it will not help him bring real entrepreneurial fun. What excites him now are the exciting new papers that have emerged in the field of AI research.To be honest, there are many founders of this type, and they are one of the few founders who can really deepen their efforts in the industry and make feasible solutions. If a large number of such founders choose to leave and leave, I think the impact on the infrastructure of the entire Ethereum will be backwards for at least three to five years.

The wonderful energy of the fusion of AI and Web3

At the beginning, everyone said that Denver Infra had no hot topics or income, but as we talked about 3 to 4 new AI*Web3 projects every day on average, we saw the Ethereum community’s active embrace of emerging technologies such as AI, as well as innovative attempts in fields such as DeTraning/Inference/DePIN.Ethereum is actively adapting to new technological trends and exploring new application scenarios.Capital and entrepreneurs have become prophets of the industry. Paradigm led the Web3 LLM company Nous research with a valuation of $1 billion. Groq has generated more than $1 billion in revenue as Inference in the past year. Openmind and Yushu Technology have created RobotAI. DePAI’s open source products are unveiled in denver. Hyperbolic has also become one of the most supported inference networks in web3 developers. There are also open source Intelligence platforms such as Open Gradient and Pluralis. At the Ethereum conference like Denver, smart developers and founders have begun to fully help Web3 embrace AI. Everyone is in Brainstorm how to make AI agents and more applications appear in the Web3 scenario.The industry never ends and stops, and research and curiosity have always made those builders go further and further.

Macro positive release, Crypto keeps pace with the times

However, after dealing with most American institutions, it is completely different from Asia. Everyone is very optimistic about the bull-market loose environment of the crypto policy. Bank of America’s policy on accepting crypto asset custody has been passed, and soon banks will gradually allow BTC/ETH to be mortgaged, and even expand to mining equipment. Here we can see a clear trend that the crypto rate cut environment is about to form, from the original 10% lending rate in the industry, it can be adjusted to about 3 to 4% or even Japan can reach negative interest rates, which will bring liquidity to the industry again.In addition, we have recently seen favorable crypto policies in the United States. Uniswap and Coinbase are considering designing tokenized securities models so that investors in traditional industries can better evaluate and purchase tokens.The benefits of regulatory release will be far beyond our imagination in this cycle, so I am very optimistic that the market will usher in a very good macro environment in the next two years.Many people say that this bull market has ended, but I don’t think so. Each bull market not only has the cooperation of the macro market, but also the self-innovation and new applications of the crypto-endogenic market. We have not seen the true innovation in this cycle. If it has not been seen, it will be a fake bull market.In the next two years, we can expect more traditional companies/even state regimes to settle in the L2 network and issue their own decentralized networks, and the prosperity of L2 business once again drives the growth and value capture of Ethereum L1.

Reconstructing Ethereum Governance: Going to Mainstream and Commercialization

On the third day of Denver, he participated in Pragma held by ETHGlobal and met several core EF developers who revealed the upcoming new organizational structure adjustments of Ethereum.What’s more interesting here is @dannyryan. His reputation and voice in the core Ethereum developer circle in the past is obvious to all. Then the newly established @Etherealize will also shoulder the mission of Consensys in the new era, helping Ethereum move towards the mainstream world and commercialization; in addition, the two Co-EDs Hsiao-Wei@hwwonx of the foundation have also been deeply engaged in Ethereum for many years, and have followed Vitalik in battle since 2016 (with the picture attached to Ethereum’s Hackers Choice Day in Beijing in 2019, the one sitting next to Vitalik is the one sitting next to Vitalik), and as the founder of Nethermind, Tomasz@tkstanczak is very familiar with the entire Ethereum ecosystem project, and as a third-party devShops, they are well versed in the more sustainable survival business logic, which can help Ethereum find a balance between infra and commercialization paths.

Never savior, V God needs to encourage more application entrepreneurs

For Ethereum, is technology research and development that important at present?Perhaps it is important in 2017, 2020, and 2022, but now it should be more important than technology.The next most important milestone to test Ethereum and the greatest confidence that ecological builders will be whether Ethereum, as a world computer, can produce super application products across the ages.

Many people regard Vitalik as the savior of Ethereum. Ethereum is the savior of the industry, but there has never been any savior.Everyone should be the savior. My previous push called for all organizations that have received generous capital accumulation and stable commercial income in this industry, in fact, they should contribute to the future of this industry. They can donate to some open source organizations on Ethereum, and create better opportunities for young people in the industry. In addition to using Grants support, many entrepreneurs still need financing support. In this wave of industry altcoins, it also hit the already shaky Asian funds. Many funds have begun to suspend operations or transform into second-level. The entrepreneurial environment in Asia is difficult. If Asian institutions invest in VCs are lost, the industry will be even thinner.Here I still call on Ethereum’s ecological organizations that early-stage risk capital must not be missing. It is recommended that all exchanges can take out 1 to 2% of their revenue every year to support the development and innovation of the Ethereum open source ecosystem.

Will Ethereum die in the next bull and bear cycle?I don’t think this is the most successful decentralized organization in the Web3 industry. We should not let it fail. Its failure means that the hundreds of billions to trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of taxons and project assets built on the Ethereum business empire need to be started over. The entire industry will fall into a 5-10-year regression, which means that many OGs will leave.

Please be reluctant to sell your Ethereum. If you look back at what happened between 2020 and 2030 in 2030 based on 10 years, you may see that the doubts and noise in 2025 were actually insignificant. How to judge value and innovation from 10 years is even more a priority worth thinking about.