Looking back on the past three years at the Hong Kong Carnival: frenzy, disenchantment and time-traveling
I really like the shift from market dream to market share because it's something I've always wanted to do.
Written by: Fourteen Jun
This is a small essay on web3 carnival in Hong Kong.
It may be a bit ugly to scold, but I want to talk about those past things and why they were falsified.
1. Is the Hong Kong web3 carnival cold?
Cold, this is also the first impression of many people, the previous conference was crowded, crowded forward, and this time almost all of them are familiar with the project parties, the VIP room is empty, there are not many people who come to see the exhibition, where will the liquidity and creativity come from in the future? But there are more people wearing suits, and the underlying logic of the industry seems to be reconstructing.
From the source of the cold touch, some people say that the layout of the venue is very strange and seems empty, and some people say that Vientiane is not well prepared, it is difficult to invite guests, the project party is scarce, and even the price of the speech on stage has returned to calm, and some voices are more like proof that I am still alive and not dead.
In my opinion, the relationship between the East and the West is still a hot face against a cold ass.
Significantly less Western, three years, in the Web3 space (and maybe more).
Even if Vitalik is there in person, in addition to the social photos of fans, the rest is the unilateral responsibility of some bald people who play bad in the industry.
Deeply ingrained are differences in culture and pursuit.
Those who only hold the technical achievements of web3 as casinos, with the screenshots of three bananas in each cycle, affect the overall direction, to build more slot machines, lure more gamblers, and siphon the builders' new results.
The collective appeal of the Western Dagong Chain to the East is at most when you are a user, not a partner.
Is it because someone else doesn't play with it here, or is there something wrong with you?
Or do you want to play with each other because what you are pursuing is not the same thing in itself?
2. Is RWA right?
Every time a keynote speech is given, more than half of them are deceived by photos, when will the content keep up with the title they choose?
RWA is the mainstream narrative this year, but is there a big difference in the underlying logic between him and the NFT of 3 years, the inscription of 2 years ago, and the meme of 1 year ago?
If you look closely at the underlying support of each cycle, you will find that once everything enters the macro perspective, it will eventually be correct and just.
RWA is also just a shell topic with a new macro perspective.
But in fact, grand narratives often ignore the rights of thousands of individuals without limit, as if "everything is a dog", and sometimes even dogs, just numbers.
Of course, catching a mainstream narrative can take off, phantom grabbed sol and meme airdrops, bitget grabbed the TG ecosystem, and walked multi-chain + annual narratives, and their annual growth is huge.
However, it is never difficult to do growth in this industry, but it is difficult to retain (resources and momentum are in place, and the growth explosion of the traditional Internet will have a more flywheel effect).
There are still limited things to do with chains, and they are basically not daily needs, and after the hundreds of wallet wars, even the hottest unisat last year has not been opened for a long time, and it does not need to be opened, which is in vain.
RWA institutions are also encountering the PPT scam of the **Web2 elite halo in the last wave of narratives,** people who open and close their mouths to "empower the ecology" but have never even used their wallets.
Interestingly, BTC events don't care about narrative, which is very promising, after all, people who chase narratives generally can't catch up, and those who create narratives still have a chance to turn around.
3. Is V okay?
What kind of conspiracy is more scary?
I think it's about turning the essence of tragedy into a choice trap, whether it's burning self-destruction or decaying slow suicide, and the most terrifying thing is that whichever path you choose will add shackles to exploration on the other.
V is already standing on a difficult multiple-choice question, and no matter what, the choice cannot be separated from an individual tragedy or a collective tragedy.
It is true that V is a genius, V is also the best in the industry in terms of hard work, and V is also very young, if the future of Ethereum is, the biggest opportunity is such a young brain and vision, bringing unlimited growth potential.
But behind any one of these features are shortcomings
A 30-year-old has the disadvantage of being a 30-year-old, being too easily surrounded by villains, and being too easily caught up in the honey of words.
V's presentations at each venue were a complete bet on L2, which is quite right, and there are plenty of logical and self-consistent reasons.
One of the great reasons is that EF is best at on-chain, not off-chain, he has infinite on-chain creation, but how to link to the off-chain needs partners to do, but EF has a cake that can't be shared, so you might as well use yourself as a platform to vacate a booth, welcome each project party to bring their own resources, EF gives you all the names you want.
But who passed on these reasons to V? Why did it become his ingrained expansion direction?
If L1 itself is good enough, then the empty city of L2 is needed? What about the divide between L2s?
The next stage of EF upgrade begins to return to the L1 experience, and the biggest resistance in the interimtime is not from L1 itself, but from L2s.
This is the current choice trap.
3. Web3+ games are unwilling but a trap
There are dozens of venues before and after this run, and it is still the venue of web3 games that I dare to say, perhaps because there are no people, so I have more feelings after the grounding house, and I will say it in a down-to-earth manner.
I first entered the industry from Loot and Ash and the breakthrough of running shoes, but now everyone is awake, players are awake, investors are also awake, and what does not give up is the obsession of the past.
Now I am still investing here, I can only talk about masturbation: ecological occupancy, defensive positioning, and considering the cost.
There are countless good reasons for games to become a good business, and even 3 years ago, the control of game version numbers was an opportunity for the explosion of web3 games. The hardware requirements of games are naturally different from those of other financial scenarios, so the web3 game public chain has always been a follow-up direction.
But from Play to Earn, OnChain, and TG Game, it looks like it's all a trap.
Because the B circle is a game, its dopamine incentive is actually not as good as playing the inscription.
When typing the inscription, during the frenzy, who does not wake up naturally at 6 o'clock, and it is difficult to fall asleep at 3 o'clock. What game can have the purest and most direct to the core of the incentive is more effective.
But they don't pull new users to each other, they are all playing with each other to make high data to fool investors, they used to just fake account data, and now they are jointly auditing and falsifying together, and even people who invest in web3 games don't play games themselves, only play Contra.
It's good to do fi in the currency circle, don't engage in game.
And game companies treat Web3 as a new field to make games, from Perfect World to South Korean game chaebol, to the Western metaverse narrative, all of which are hanging in the wasteland left by making games in the B circle.
Before and after, it is the users who have been spoiled by this 100W, those who are not on the chain do not play, and those who are on the chain only play financial attributes, since they want to play financial attributes, it is better to play meme.
If you go from 0 to educating external users to the chain, why bother? Who wants to do the hard work of user education?
But the game itself is indeed a good business, and miHoYo has provided him with a 10% increase in total revenue even in the surrounding areas, but this gross profit can reach 70%.
Now it is true that there is no team in the market that can make a profit in the game, and the game, as a product that provides emotional value, will generate value even in the process, compared to many products with pure result value on the chain (such as the public chain that is painstakingly built, and the value is completely lost if no one plays).
Therefore, the game will continue to fool some investors who are not yet dead.
600 million valid addresses, think this is the Internet in 94, and then save up, the thicker the feces, the more fragrant the flowers.
4. Is the bear market coming?
In the past few years, I have seen the era of bears but not the bearest, and I have also seen the most breakthrough eras, and every period of narrative confusion seems to be before and after the HK conference.
After last year's Bitcoin Asia, the inscription was cold, the market was cold, the pressure on the project side increased, and the more honey was operated, the more difficult it was to think calmly.
As always, there are many faces at this conference, but the project has changed for 2-3 rounds, and although serial entrepreneurs are always ridiculed, it is more worth cherishing.
Those who have seen the cycle know that a bear market is the opportunity for builders.
With only years of experience in stepping on pits, I now know better what it takes to survive.
The "enterprise blockchain" movement was widely seen as a dead end, but it has been revived with the advent of L2s, with Soneium being a prime example.
An increasingly ineffective "decel" community that can rant at how unethical and bad various mainstream actors can be, but can't really offer a better alternative.
But these are pits
DeFi was supposed to replace banks, NFTs were meant to redefine ownership, and the metaverse was supposed to be the new gathering place for people. But after billions of dollars in promises, the only thing that is truly widely used is stablecoins, and their counterparts and markets.
Some people say that those who do not repurchase are all hard business, and they have to keep looking for new users, and some scenarios are superimposed with long-term after-sales service, and they have to continue to entangle old customers until they go out of business. In fact, high liquidity and lack of core retention are also hard business.
In these businesses, the biggest loss in this round is the new vulnerable group: VC, who once gave guidance to the project and grabbed a good project is a hundredfold profit, to now being cut by the project party, and rarely making money. Selling goods after TGE is also the project party and the market maker making money first.
I didn't dare to vote at all, and I lost one by one. It's not so much a problem with the industry, but with the operation of the early project parties.
The era of relying on narrative to make infrastructure bigger is over, and there is no room for projects with high valuations and low circulation, the valuation system of all VC projects is being reconstructed, and old projects are being reshuffled.
In the new cycle, don't be too superstitious about policy.
Hong Kong has changed a lot, but the bottom is still saying, "We accept it, as long as we don't mess it up."
In today's market, institutions have taken over. It is no longer a situation that can be challenged by small entrepreneurial ideas. Either adapt and learn the game, or get knocked out. It is not easy to lead in one direction, and the cooperation between institutions and entrepreneurs has just begun.
5. Where are the opportunities in the future?
It looks like it's scolding, but those things that have been messed up should be sprayed, and they will return to reason after spraying, after all, not all these years have been chicken feathers.
After the inscription turmoil, it began to be caught off guard, and half a year later, what was left was the optimization of the infrastructure.
Today's meme storm is also halfway through, from gmgn to Axiom, leaving behind products that know how to understand needs and are proficient in the technology at the bottom of the chain. A lot of performance is not proficient in the bottom layer, and it can't be done to the extreme.
With the outbreak of GMGN but not knowing how to share the cake, it has forced high-quality talent to move within the industry.
In terms of the crowd, after entering the deep water area, a group of people have completed the popularization of user education, as well as the turn of scientific research in colleges and universities, so that the talent base of the future industry is very solid.
At this time, although the VC is more cautious, there is a tool layer with a clear business model user group, and the application layer has ushered in the opportunity for objective evaluation.
Cryptography has reached a bottleneck, and users are breaking the limit.
Because many behaviors in the real world cannot be proven by cryptography, and not everything can be solved with decentralization. The bottlenecks of efficiency and technology are there, and each bottleneck is an opportunity, and the gap between centralization and decentralization will not continue in the future.
Before this has a clear goal, what you need to do is to protect your attention, improve your ability to identify what is garbage, and maintain a good mood and live a long life from the fluctuations of the cycle.
6. Finally
Some of my frustrations with the industry are true, and they stem from the high expectations in the early days, which completely regarded the term web3 as the scale of the next generation of infrastructure.
But now, it would be much more rational to just think of him as Crypto Finance 3.
Some attempts that do not match crypto finance do not need to be paid attention to.
There is always such a group of people in the world who pursue freedom, and it would be good to make the best tools and facilities for these people.
Reading to the present friends, your attention is precious, don't be filled with other people's gossip in your life, otherwise when ordinary people's information sources are monopolized by Twitter KOLs and abstract talk communities, they will only become "consensus cannon fodder".
What really deserves attention is always those who become KOLs by the way after doing their best work.
A friend (@Odyssey_Leexixi) said:
Now, people no longer believe in all kinds of blowing bubbles, and this is also reflected in the venue. The low-hanging fruits have been picked, and everyone has turned to product-market fit, making products that truly meet the needs of users, have cash flow, and have a business model.
I really like the shift from market dream to market share because it's something I've always wanted to do.
This article is sourced from Foresight News:
https://foresightnews.pro/article/detail/82233
Respectfully submitted by the AIC Team
April23, 2025
