Is Culture the "Hard Currency" of Public Blockchains?
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Is Culture the "Hard Currency" of Public Blockchains?
The next blockchain sensation may have nothing to do with technology, but rather be driven by community and meme magic.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: 13300RPM, Researcher at FourPillarsFP
Translation: zhouzhou, BlockBeats
Editor's Note: Competition in the crypto industry is shifting from technological superiority to cultural resonance. Cultural chains have emerged as a new trend. Technology has become "good enough"—the key to the future lies in community atmosphere and shared identity. Investors should focus on believers, inside jokes, and community culture rather than just code performance. Cultural chains offer dedicated ecosystems for fans and creators but also face challenges such as excessive speculation and fragmented liquidity. To succeed, cultural chains need strong communities, open development, and composability—making them potential core赛道 of the next cycle.
Below is the original content (slightly edited for clarity):
Imagine a blockchain whose killer feature isn't a revolutionary consensus algorithm or astonishing TPS, but *vibes*. On this chain, people gather not because of low gas fees, but because of inside memes, shared identities, and meme culture. Sounds absurd? Yet time and again, crypto has proven that culture often triumphs over technology.
Consider $DOGE (and dozens of similar tokens)—an outright joke born from a meme, yet mysteriously surged into a multi-billion dollar market cap asset with zero technical innovation. Bitcoin’s early growth was driven more by cypherpunk ideology than its codebase. Ethereum’s most loyal users often say: “I came for the tech, but stayed for the community.” Events like ETHGlobal hackathons and global Devcons have long transcended coding—they are cultural bonds among developers.
The crypto world has evolved into a stage where participation itself is the product—a deeply immersive social game blending finance, ideology, and culture.
Welcome to the era of cultural chains: blockchains that matter not for what they can do, but for who they were built by and for.
1. Culture as Product
Cultural chains are vertical SaaS platforms for fan economies
In short, a cultural chain is a blockchain imbued with cultural spirit—custom-built for a specific community, subculture, or movement. Unlike general-purpose L1s (trying to serve everyone) or app-specific chains (appchains), cultural chains occupy a unique middle ground. They are playgrounds designed for people who share the same vibe or mission, hosting multiple apps and serving a defined tribe.
By this definition, one might argue every blockchain already has its own culture. Ethereum blends cypherpunk ideals with institutional thinking, emphasizing decentralization, programmability, and neutrality. Solana radiates speed, chaos, and financial speculation—shaped by its high-throughput, low-cost architecture.
But the difference is this: those cultural identities are largely side effects of technical design, not intentional outcomes. General-purpose blockchains organically develop cultures; cultural chains, however, are built from the protocol layer up to serve cultural economies. The real distinction is intentionality.
Imagine a blockchain where every dApp serves anime art collectors, hardcore degen gamblers, RPG enthusiasts, or fans of a particular NFT ecosystem. Users speak the same jargon, chase the same trends, laugh at the same memes. It feels less like infrastructure and more like a digital city-state running on-chain.
If general-purpose chains resemble chaotic, diverse global metropolises, cultural chains are more like theme parks or Renaissance fairs—highly customized, precisely tailored to specific audiences. By focusing on a niche, they can optimize everything—technology, governance, tokenomics—around the values and needs of their community.
They are blockchains engineered for monetizing, scaling, and protecting culture.
This vision can take many forms:
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Infrastructure optimized for specific creators or media types
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Built-in revenue sharing or tokenized copyright distribution
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Governance models suited for creative communities
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Incentive mechanisms enabling fan participation, funding, and discovery of new content
At its core, a cultural chain is an evolution of the “vertical blockchain” concept—not trying to do everything, but excelling in one domain. Their goal is to become “the go-to blockchain for X,” where X is a culturally cohesive community or use case. The underlying assumption: focusing on a cultural tribe enables stronger network effects than general-purpose chains by uniting like-minded users and builders. Their power comes from focus.
2. Code Can Be Copied, But Vibe Can’t
In crypto, community matters more than code. When choosing a chain, count believers per block—not just transactions per second.
Is culture really more important than code? Many tech purists scoff. After all, blockchain infrastructure involves math, cryptography, engineering, game theory—the hard sciences. Yet while “code is law,” in crypto, “culture is king.” Ultimately, it’s the social layer that decides which “laws” get adopted.
A perfect protocol dies if no one believes in it; a rough meme coin thrives when backed by fervent believers.
Fundamentally, crypto networks are social networks with banking features. Human nature drives adoption: FOMO, tribalism, identity, belief. These cannot be forked from GitHub.
Recall Bitcoin Cash—technically similar, but culturally split (big blocks vs small blocks)—yet that cultural rift determined its fate. Or Ethereum Classic, forked from Ethereum due to ideological differences: same code, different culture, divergent outcomes.
Memes and narratives hold atomic-level power in this space.
Remember DeFi Summer? Yield farming exploded not just because of smart contracts, but because degens shouted “farm and dump” and “all in ape,” fueling a collective mania. Look at the NFT boom: why did JPEGs on Ethereum skyrocket in value? Not because ERC-721 was technically groundbreaking (it wasn’t), but because digital art collectors, flexers, and community players built a unique culture around CryptoPunks, Bored Apes, and others. Tech enabled verifiable ownership—but social status and belonging drove the frenzy.
A public chain’s long-term success often hinges on its community moat. Herein lies crypto’s paradox: the strongest moat isn’t hash rate or TPS—it’s belief. Value exists not only in code, but in the culture that forms around it.
This intangible “magic” makes people tattoo project logos on their arms or HODL through 90% drawdowns. It turns early adopters into evangelists and makes a project feel inevitable. Cultural chains bet precisely on this insight—on the power of niche fanaticism, not mass-market generic solutions.
3. Forget TAM—Start With Tribes
General-purpose chains pray for users. Cultural chains come pre-loaded with them.
But the critical question remains: is this model actually viable? Any new blockchain paradigm must be both technically feasible and economically scalable to survive.
Unlike past “blockchain revolution” narratives, cultural chains take a pragmatic approach. They don’t rebuild infrastructure from scratch—they leverage existing frameworks and refine them for cultural economies.
Today, technological advances (ironically, tech enabling culture) make launching a new chain easier than ever. OP Stack, Arbitrum Orbit, Cosmos SDK, combined with modular blockchains, data availability layers (DA Layers), and Rollup-as-a-Service (RAAS), mean you no longer need a PhD in distributed systems to spin up a chain.
This means cultural chains are already technically feasible—not sci-fi dreams.
Critics often question the Total Addressable Market (TAM), arguing niche focus limits growth. But zoom out: BTS’s global fandom is estimated at 90 million—nearly triple Solana’s peak monthly active users (31M).
More importantly, fanbases aren’t passive—they consume, organize, act. They’re not just users; they’re dormant cultural infrastructure waiting to be activated.
Stop obsessing over TAM. Start measuring TAC—Total Addressable Culture.
4. Not Just Hype: Real Projects, Real Value
Cultural chains aren’t theoretical—they’re live, attracting genuinely engaged users.
Several early projects are already building this vision:
Story: An Open Storytelling Universe on Chain
What if the next great fantasy universe or comic IP wasn’t created by a single studio, but co-built by an entire on-chain community? @StoryProtocol is betting on exactly that.
Story is a new L1 aiming to become decentralized IP infrastructure for the internet—a platform where creators collaboratively build and remix stories on-chain, with blockchain tracking contributions and ownership.
Technically, it’s rooted in provenance for creative works. But its true innovation is cultural: Story seeks to cultivate a tribe of storytellers, turning fan communities into DAOs.
If successful, the next “Harry Potter”-level phenomenon could emerge from decentralized co-creation—where memes, fan fiction, and community lore intertwine, secured by blockchain authenticity and ownership.
Story represents a paradigm shift: viewing blockchain not as cold tech, but as a canvas for memes, myths, and collaborative creativity.
Animecoin: The On-Chain Nexus of Global Anime Culture
Anime culture is vast and borderless, connecting hundreds of millions worldwide through shared love for Japanese animation. Now imagine if this entire community had a native token to unify and empower them. That’s exactly what @animecoin ($ANIME) aims to achieve.
Launched recently as a “cultural coin,” Animecoin seeks to bring anime fans onto the blockchain. Its premise is simple: transform an existing, vibrant subculture into a crypto-native ecosystem. For deeper analysis, see reports like *“Anime Needs Web3”* and *“The Future of $ANIME is Yours.”*
$ANIME can be used to:
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Fund fan-driven projects like doujinshi or indie animations;
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Buy and trade anime-related digital assets like NFT art and virtual collectibles;
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Participate in governance, voting to support emerging anime creators.
But beyond utility, $ANIME functions more as a cultural flag—giving global otakus a shared economic identity.
It’s still early, but even capturing a fraction of the global otaku population means millions of new crypto users—many of whom care more about Crunchyroll than cryptographic primitives.
Animecoin embodies the essence of cultural chains: it doesn’t ask people to love crypto first. Instead, it builds crypto around something they already love—identity and culture.
5. The Cracks in the Cultural Economy: When Fans Become Investors
Yet the biggest risk for cultural chains stems from an uncomfortable question: Can fans truly become investors?
Consumption and investment are fundamentally different behaviors. Unless someone is deeply embedded in both crypto and a specific culture, there’s no guarantee these two distinct groups will naturally merge. Perhaps the idea that “fan communities evolve into investor communities” is overly optimistic simplification.
Second, a more immediate danger: when speculation overtakes authentic cultural engagement, the economy collapses. This was repeatedly proven in past P2E (play-to-earn) games—when economic incentives were driven by hype, not real demand, collapse was inevitable. Cultural chains face the same threat: if financial rewards replace cultural identity, speculation quietly hollows out the ecosystem.
Finally, fragmentation and liquidity silos. If every niche culture spins off its own chain, we risk recreating the very isolation interoperability was meant to solve. To avoid this, cultural chains must have composable infrastructure and maintain liquidity bridges to the broader crypto economy—or risk being trapped in isolated bubbles.
6. Moats Built on MEMEs
If you wouldn’t wear the hoodie, don’t bet on the chain. Despite the risks, I remain bullish on cultural chains—for one reason: when they ignite, their impact is exponential.
In crypto, technical advantages are fleeting—today’s “cutting-edge tech” becomes tomorrow’s baseline. But social alpha—the edge derived from community—is one of the few truly sustainable moats. For investors and builders, leveraging culture isn’t gaming the system—it’s strategic “dimensional warfare.”
For VCs and investors:
When evaluating cultural chains, don’t just check TPS and GitHub commits. Ask:
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Does this community have soul?
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Is there a core group of true believers who’ll hold through bear markets?
It sounds mystical, but it’s a crucial early signal of organic growth potential. A project with average tech but a strong meme army may grow faster than a technically superior but culturally sterile one. In other words, investing in cultural chains is like investing in social networks: look beyond code efficiency to community activity, identity, and network effects.
For Web3 founders:
Cultural chains offer direct access to highly aligned user bases. You’re not searching blindly—you’re entering a community already hungry for your product.
But this also means you can’t hide behind tech—community feedback is immediate and blunt. Build openly, involve the community in shaping the narrative. Beyond code, think like an urban planner: governance, social features, event design, lore. On cultural chains, social UX is as vital as UI/UX.
For traders, creators, and everyday users:
Cultural chains let your passion go from niche to mainstream. If you’ve been building in an ecosystem but felt constrained by general-purpose chains, now you finally have your own stage.
But maintaining the culture is now your responsibility. In a cultural chain, you are both content and value. Managed well, you could help build the next Ethereum-like community. Mismanaged, internal decay could destroy it. Choose your tribe wisely. Bet carefully.
7. The Next Cycle Belongs to the Believers
From 2010 to early 2020, crypto competition centered on TPS and technical roadmaps. Those days are over. Today, many chains are already “good enough” technically. The next battlefront is cultural density per block.
In the late 2020s, the chains that stand out won’t necessarily be those capable of processing millions of TPS, but those hosting millions of memes, high-quality interactions, and resonant communities.
So if you’re hunting for the next big crypto trend, stop asking “What can this chain’s code do?” and start asking “What does this community believe in?” Seek out places rich with inside jokes, rituals, and thick cultural vibes. That’s where cultural chains are born—and where the next generation of blockchains may emerge.
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