Reality defeats ideals, crypto community is being torn apart

Produced by: Web3Future

Author: CryptobraveHQ (X: cryptobraveHQ)

Web3 community construction under the wave of encryption right wing (I)

What is a community in the world of Web3? This question seems simple, but it contains profound changes in the crypto industry. From early technological idealism to today's financialization and capital centralization, the Web3 community is undergoing a profound transformation from "left" to "right".

When I was immersed and built in the crypto community for more than 4 years and communicated with many community friends, everyone felt that the crypto community "turned right" in this cycle was very obvious. Therefore, I tried to explore the current development stage of the Web3 community, how to deal with this transformation, and the direction of future community construction through three series of articles.

Multiple bodies of the community

From different perspectives, the definition of communities is different:

In the eyes of technology-led project founders, developers are the community because they are the core of ecological expansion and application innovation.

In the eyes of the narrative-led VC coin team, whoever can provide liquidity is the community, such as Binance, whose huge user base provides liquidity for the project.

In the eyes of the price-dominated meme team, KOL and traffic distribution are the community because they can attract attention.

In the eyes of TGE's project team, Builder and Holder are the communities, and they are the core forces that accompany the project through the cycle.

These different definitions actually reflect the core driving force of the Web3 community at different stages of development.

The evolution of the Web3 community

Early crypto community

Born in a geek culture of technological idealism, it emphasizes privacy, anti-authority and decentralization, and is close to left-wing liberalism.

The mid-term crypto community

It gradually evolved into a financial speculative community with developers, exchanges, retail investors and early institutions as the main body, and it is more pragmatic.

Today's crypto community

Financialization, capital and power centralization began, and institutional and government investors accelerated their entry, closer to right-wing conservatism.

Of course, this turn is not unrelated to the global right-wing turn. For example, Trump, the representative of the new populist right, was re-elected as US president and the emergence of Argentina's far-right President Mile. I will not discuss it here.

In the previous cycle, technology was the core of the project, the development team focused on long-term construction, and community members were willing to pay for technical idealism. However, in the current cycle, the importance of narrative goes beyond the technology itself, and the success of a project no longer depends on technological innovation, but revolves around price and capital operations. The rise of memecoins proves this even more, and technology is no longer the focus of attention.

Community tear : Only the "far right" can surpass the right

Taking Ethereum and Solana as examples, the community dispute between the two is very obvious. The Ethereum community focuses more on technological idealism and decentralization, while the Solana community emphasizes more on efficiency and capital operations. This division reflects the tearing of the Web3 community under the right-wing wave.

Let's take a look at the comparison between Ethereum and BNB Chain. It is not difficult to find that the current BNB Chain is "more right" than Solana. Because BNB Chain needs to compete with Solana through ecological strategies such as meme and AI Agent, it can only be more centralized, inject stronger capital and trading resources (linked investment, currency listing, market making, etc.), and unite the community more united than Solana.

Exchange compliance

The same trend is also reflected in the centralized exchange track. In the last cycle, most exchanges were developing logic for different market supervision arbitrage around the world, and in terms of compliance, they were "get on the bus first and then make up for the ticket." Nowadays, most exchanges pay more attention to compliance and strive to conduct market operations under the compliance framework.

Similar logic of left and right poles can also compare different market players such as DEX and Bot (such as Uniswap, Jupiter, GMGN…), market makers (Wintermute, GSR, DWF, shadow market makers…). I won’t expand here. , you can set standards and judge them by yourself.

Future community building

In general, in the past crypto circle, everyone paid for technical narratives and pursued decentralization and fairness. The founder emphasized long-term construction without caring about prices, which was close to the left-wing atmosphere of idealism. But now the market is moving to the right. Everyone is focusing on prices and short-term returns, emphasizing corporate management and strong operations, projects and supervision are closely cooperating, and centralized interest alliances support each other. Making money is the most important thing.

Personally, I believe that whether it is to the left or right, it is an objective result of market choice under the influence of industry evolution trends, and it is a reflexive nature that emerges after the trend is overwhelming and declines - after idealism, realism Dominate.

In the next article, I will continue to share how to build a crypto community at this stage under the right-wing wave. For example, building a developer community, liquidity community, KOL marketing, and the growth of social media data. Everyone is welcome to communicate with us.