A Brief Discussion on Crypto Nihilism: Bitcoin and Web3 as the Only Path to Redemption for Our Generation
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A Brief Discussion on Crypto Nihilism: Bitcoin and Web3 as the Only Path to Redemption for Our Generation
During the period of inflated expectations, we must remain rational; during the period of bubble burst, we must also remain rational.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: NingNing
Now is just like then.
Today’s depth and breadth of nihilism across the crypto industry mirror that of Q3 and Q4 in 2019. Back then, the crypto space was trapped in an inward-looking innovation loop—Fomo3D, EOS gambling dApps, ultra-high-leverage perpetual contracts—frantically extracting every last drop of market liquidity. Practitioners lost faith and confidence; the claim that "crypto = Ponzi" dominated discourse, while smaller CEXs rolled out multi-tier referral ambassador programs one after another.
At the time, a veteran OG personally told me the entire crypto industry was dead and advised me to “go straight.” Yet just nine months later, DeFi Summer arrived amid wave after wave of skepticism and mockery, reshaping the entire industry through disruptive innovation and revealing the first signs of what could truly be called the “internet of value.”
Time passes, cycles turn—the crypto industry seems once again mired in the same quagmire it faced five years ago. The disastrous post-TGE performance of certain flagship project tokens has triggered unprecedented weariness and backlash against VC narratives. The vague concept of “value coins” has been deliberately or inadvertently weaponized as a target for ridicule and abuse. Irrationality, deconstruction, fragmentation, emotion, and noise are now dominating the crypto markets like never before.
Some prominent VCs have even declared “Meme is King,” riding this wave to extract liquidity and profit from an irrational market structure. While a few VC founders have bravely spoken up—arguing that “meme is not everything in crypto”—they’ve been collectively attacked by retail investors.
Few realize that the meme craze on Solana is a calculated strategy—an open play—to capture long-tail asset liquidity from Ethereum's mainnet. The wealth myths spun by insiders and smart money serve the same function as lottery jackpots worth hundreds of millions: bait to lure retail investors into PvPvP schemes that are inevitably negative-EV games. Meanwhile, the explosion of memes on Base represents Ethereum’s ecosystem responding to this challenge out of necessity.
Today, attention and liquidity in the market are being siphoned away by this protracted Web3 architectural battle between the Ethereum and Solana ecosystems. Beyond the struggle for liquidity, Solana has introduced new primitives such as ZK Compression and Blinks, competing with Ethereum on scalability and Web3 social infrastructure.
The smoke emitted from this silent war blankets the entire crypto market, clouding our vision and causing us to overlook paradigm-shifting innovations emerging at the periphery—app-specific rollups, chain abstraction, AI oracles, AI dApps, consumer chains, ZK coprocessor networks, Bitcoin’s growing ecosystem, and more. These fringe-driven paradigm shifts will, in the next innovation cycle, disrupt and reshape the entire industry just as DeFi did in the last.
Crypto and Web3, as emerging technologies, follow the Gartner Hype Cycle—they pass through phases of innovation trigger, peak of inflated expectations, trough of disillusionment, slope of enlightenment, and plateau of productivity. During periods of inflated expectations, we must remain rational; during times of disillusionment, we must also remain rational.
Recently, Peter, a leader at the Ethereum Foundation, went viral for a tweet expressing regret over choosing the wrong career path. He contrasted the tangible value created by SpaceX’s engine iterations with the technological iterations in Web3, candidly criticizing our industry for generating only value transfer rather than real value creation over the past years.
He is right. But his cultural and economic background makes him less sensitive to the profound significance of value transfer. For individuals like us living under non-free market systems, it's no exaggeration to say that BTC and the Web3 value network represent the only path of redemption available to our generation.
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