jakiro
Author｜Jocy @IOSG
Preface
I believe you have seen many of the first two weeksConsensus HKI will not repeat the records of the book, and I can summarize most of them asI am disappointed in the industry and cannot see the prospect of breaking the situation, and I believe 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 worked harder than funds and entrepreneurs deserved 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 became the most lively discussion in HK.
Kaito’s victory gave KOLs their golden age, with attention being priced and cashing out quickly.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 the long-term holders have begun to bearish Ethereum and turn to Solana.Many people cannot see the Hungry level 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 usually takes no two days to complete the docking and grouping and start communication with the sol foundation), this seems to be deliberately done by the crypto industry,In this small bull market, long-term holders are not encouraged, but give better returns to short-term traders, but in my opinion, this is for industry leaders such as Ethereum inaction or lack of 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 splash 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 price and chain, the exchange can give up the listing standard to 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 in 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 insistence on building entrepreneurs.
Such moments are very similar to those in 2018/2022, very deserted, and practitioners leave because they don’t 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 see the version: Denver infra’s founder is very bearish, but both the application and AI founder are very bullish.
I still saw a lot of Denver’s tripShocking scene, 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, and they have successfully raised funds all the way. They have also seen many projects that are not as good as theirs have performed well in the speculative market of tokens. They may never have thought that one day they would not be able to raise money, and the coins they issued would be zeroed like other air coins.When the runway had only last 6 to 9 months left, I slowly realized that I wanted to truly build a product with revenue and user base, and began to seriously think about what the problem of Ethereum is.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 projects that have been deeply cultivated and built on the Ethereum and EVM ecosystems have raised more than tens of billions of dollars, and their overall primary and secondary market valuations have totaled more than one trillion 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 posted 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 ecological 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 only one.But these people are also tired of it. No matter how good the solution is to provide technical protocols without end users and needs, it will not help him with real entrepreneurial pleasure. 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 and make feasible solutions in the industry.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 first everyone said that Denver infra had no hot topics or interest, but after we talked about 3 to 4 new AI*Web3 projects every day,We have seen the Ethereum community’s active embrace of emerging technologies such as AI and innovative attempts in areas 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 at 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 Ethereum conferences like Denver, smart developers and founders have begun to fully help Web3 embrace AI. Everyone is in Brainstorm how to make AI agentsand more applications appear in Web3 scenarios.There is never a point in time for the industry to end and stop, and research and curiosity will keep those builders going further and further.
▲ Openmind and Yushu Technology have created RobotAI, and DePAI’s open source product is unveiled at denver
Macro positive release, Crypto keeps pace with the times
However, after dealing with most American institutions, I found that the situation was completely different from that in Asia. Everyone was very optimistic about the bull-market 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 collateralized, and even expand to mining equipment. Here we can see a clear trend that isAn environment for crypto-rate interest rate cuts is about to form. From the original 10% loan interest rate in the industry, it can be adjusted to around 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.Both Uniswap and Coinbase are considering designing tokenized securities models that allow traditional industry investors to better evaluate and buy 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 has the self-innovation and new applications of the crypto-endogenic market.We have not seen real innovation in this cycle, so if there is no such thing as this will be a fake bull market.In the next two years, we can expect more traditional companies/even state powers to settle in the L2 network and issue their own decentralized network.The prosperity of L2 business has once again driven the growth and value capture of Ethereum L1.
Reconstructing Ethereum Governance: Going to Mainstream and Commercialization
On the third day of Denver, he attended Pragma held by ETHGlobal and met several core EF developers who revealed the upcoming new organizational structure adjustments for 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. Since 2016, they have followed Vitalik to fight in the north (with the picture attached to Ethereum’s Hackers Day in Beijing in 2019, the one sitting next to Vitalik is the one sitting next to Vitalik).In addition, Tomasz @tkstanczak As the founder of Nethermind, he is very familiar with the entire Ethereum ecosystem project. As a third-party dev shops, they are well versed in the more sustainable survival business logic, which can help Ethereum find a balance between infra and commercialization paths.
▲ Attached picture: On the 2019 Ethereum Hackers Selection Day in Beijing, the person sitting next to Vitalik is Co-EDs Hsiao-Wei @hwwonx
Actually, the problems encountered by VitalikLike all entrepreneurs, the team is too big to lead.Friends who know how to study personal personality traits can try to analyze the journey of V God, from the Twitter avatar of Milady’s emoticon to the disappointment with encrypted OG, and replaced it with the half-human and half-bird image of World of Warcraft, Druid, which also represents his inner reconciliation of the community voice, and officially announced the new team structure of Ethereum the next day.Ethereum may be the first truly decentralized organization and economy in history.We should be more tolerant of this man who has just reached his thirty years old. He does not have particularly outstanding performance in organizational structure management and Ethereum application commercialization, but who can lead this organization and create more glory and results?Perhaps Ethereum can also learn from Elon Musk to create a DOGE Discipline Inspection Commission, which is specifically responsible for abolition of some irresponsible dev and virtual positions. How to measure the value of contribution and KPI is an important issue before the V God.In addition, give internal core developers clearer value propositions and development needs, give management teams a more specific roadmap and management time limit requirements, and better allow Ethereum to return to community and elected governance.As the cornerstone of Web3, Ethereum is also actively exploring Layer2 solutions and technology upgrades to meet the growing application needs.
Never SaviorV 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 it should be more important to apply now 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, I called for the last push.All organizations that have obtained generous capital accumulation and stable commercial income in this industry should actually 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 to 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 institutional investment 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 talent and project assets built on the Ethereum business empire need to be started over, and 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, you may see that the doubts and noise in 2025 are actually insignificant. How to judge value and innovation from a 10-year dimension is even more of a priority worth thinking about.
Optimists are often right. The more difficult and ups and downs the stages, they should maintain confidence and optimism.
