Memes are to public blockchains what restaurants are to cities.
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Memes are to public blockchains what restaurants are to cities.
Often, only great cities have a wide variety of excellent restaurants.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Orange Book
After riding the meme wave on Solana, one awkwardly realizes that memes—seemingly simple, brainless, and technically undemanding—are actually a huge challenge for most blockchains to sustain over time, constantly generating new stories and entertainment. It doesn’t matter how high the market cap, how brilliant the vision, or how thriving the ecosystem; none of that helps. Right now, only Ethereum and Solana can consistently produce memes.
Why is this the case?
I believe that, at this stage, memes are a kind of quasi-luxury good for blockchains. Yes, those seemingly lowbrow memes are actually quasi-luxuries. They might not be inherently hard to obtain, but for most blockchains that have only just solved their basic survival needs, memes remain out of reach—like luxuries.
If a blockchain is like a city, then most blockchain cities today are still small villages—with only hundreds or thousands of residents, basic utilities like water and electricity, roads, infrastructure, a few mahjong parlors, and little else in terms of commercial activity.
Memes are like restaurants in a city. Small villages don't have restaurants—there aren't enough people, and most cook for themselves. But in a city, it's different: there are more people, more money, diverse tastes. Restaurants of all kinds can open. Some may fail quickly, but that’s okay—new ones keep emerging, and there are always new customers willing to try them.
Restaurants may seem ordinary, seemingly unrelated to world-class cities. But in reality, only great cities have rich, diverse, high-quality dining scenes. If you want to taste global cuisines in one place, that city must itself be a global metropolis.
Like cities, blockchains are complex system engineering projects that must evolve step by step, with each phase building on the last: first comes speculation on urban land (the blockchain’s native token), then basic utilities (core software and infrastructure), followed by service industries like restaurants (meme NFTs), and finally more sophisticated, cutting-edge technologies (fully on-chain games and social platforms). Attempting to skip stages and jump straight to high-tech is almost impossible.
From this perspective, Ethereum remains in the lead. The most advanced fully on-chain games and social applications are emerging within the Ethereum ecosystem. Ethereum got an early start with unique advantages, catching the ICO wave at just the right time—surpassing even Bitcoin when it comes to issuing assets.
Other blockchains still have opportunities to catch up, but it's difficult to skip intermediate stages. They’ll need clever strategies and timely opportunities—for example, the recent revival of the Bitcoin ecosystem. If they can seize this new wave of asset issuance,跨越式发展 (leapfrog development) may become possible.
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