Myths, Memes, and Belonging: The Deep Needs of Crypto Culture
TechFlow Selected TechFlow Selected
Myths, Memes, and Belonging: The Deep Needs of Crypto Culture
Aside from Bitcoin and Solana meme coins, the sector hasn't notably introduced new participants over the years, leading to a sense of nihilism hanging over the entire industry, especially in Ethereum and related ecosystems.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: DeFi Dave
Translator: Block unicorn
Crypto is facing a narrative crisis. To be sure, there has been technical progress—infrastructure, throughput, and scalability have improved by orders of magnitude. Yet culturally, we seem "stuck," largely because we’ve forgotten how to tell compelling stories. Aside from Bitcoin and Solana meme coins, the space hasn’t meaningfully attracted new participants in years, resulting in a cloud of nihilism hanging over the industry—especially around Ethereum and its ecosystem.
So what’s the solution? Merely telling stories isn’t enough; marketing them is certainly not enough. You must build myths. Mythmaking isn’t just repeating narratives—it’s about paving the way for a shared mythos that others can join and co-create.
While writing this piece, I struggled to fully encapsulate the concept of mythmaking I aim to define, as it's an emerging idea still being articulated. The definition provided here is preliminary. In future articles, I will expand, clarify, and offer more examples supporting my views, while also welcoming others to contribute their own interpretations.
You Need to Do Mythmaking, Anonymous One
Mythmaking is the act of cultivating a living narrative—one that observes relevant issues of the present, transmits universally resonant and enduring memes, and uses these elements to form a story people identify with and co-create.
Mythmakers are those who recognize emerging ideas, understand their historical context, absorb collective sentiment, weave them into a coherent and compelling narrative, and invite others to participate. They are the prophets of myth. Great mythmakers don’t dictate direction; they listen, serving as stewards of the myth while remaining responsive to its organic evolution. Mythmaking cannot be faked or bought—it must be authentically experienced and embodied.
Mythmaking begins with one or more ideas—an initial seed of meaning—planted by a founding mythmaker into fertile cultural soil, then carefully nurtured as it takes root in the hearts of early believers. If a myth crosses a certain threshold and gains sufficient strength, it attracts new groups who contribute through their own rituals, memes, fragments, and actions. Like annual rings forming in a tree trunk, these contributions mark the myth’s growth across generations, each adding new layers of meaning and momentum.
The three levels of myth effectiveness are attention, emotion, and co-creation. The first level, attention, occurs when people direct some energy toward the myth but aren’t yet fully invested. The second level, emotion, emerges when people begin to feel ownership and develop identity around the myth. The third and final level is co-creation: individuals become so deeply invested that they actively contribute in their own way. This could be something as simple as an inside joke or copy-paste text, or as significant as a landmark event or a new narrative that draws in fresh community members.
At its core, mythmaking is a collective storytelling practice shaped by shared experience. At its highest form, it transforms repeated behaviors and memes into common culture—giving people a sense of belonging, motivating action, and creating a lineage passed down to future generations.
Mythmaking in Bitcoin and Ethereum
We could cite countless examples of mythmaking in practice, but to illustrate my point, I’ll focus solely on Bitcoin and Ethereum. Satoshi Nakamoto himself can be seen as the "Abrahamic" mythmaker for both—his vision not only laid the foundation for Bitcoin but also influenced many other protocols, much like Abraham is considered the patriarch of the world’s three major religions. With both Bitcoin and Ethereum having existed for over a decade, we now have enough hindsight to understand their origins and development.
Bitcoin
Bitcoin originated with its founding mythmaker, Satoshi Nakamoto, who conceived it in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis—a moment when people seriously began questioning the modern political and financial order and imagining alternatives. In the original whitepaper, Bitcoin was described as a “peer-to-peer electronic cash system,” rooted in the idea of sovereign money governed by code rather than human institutions. Features like decentralization, censorship resistance, and scarcity were embedded directly into the protocol.
Bitcoin wasn’t the first attempt at digital currency; predecessors like DigiCash, Bit Gold, and Hashcash had come before. But what Satoshi did was synthesize the most effective components from these earlier efforts (proof-of-work, digital signatures, scarcity) into a complete system, while introducing novel mechanisms such as the longest-chain rule and halving schedule.
Satoshi planted Bitcoin’s seed by inscribing a message in the genesis block: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” From the earliest days, the community organically took up the mantle of spreading Bitcoin. Their contributions—establishing the principle of anonymity, creating the “HODL” meme, rituals like Bitcoin Pizza Day, or trauma-bonding events like Mt. Gox that gave rise to the slogan “Not your keys, not your coins”—all became part of the myth.
A full examination of Bitcoin’s history through the lens of mythmaking could itself fill an article, but key mythmakers and defining eras include: Satoshi with the cypherpunks, establishing foundational principles; “Dread Pirate Roberts” during the Silk Road era, proving Bitcoin’s first real-world use case; Roger Ver (“Bitcoin Jesus”), funding the first generation of startups; and Michael Saylor during the Wall Street era, bringing Bitcoin into institutional finance.
Ethereum
While Bitcoin pioneered crypto mythmaking, Ethereum is fruit that never strayed far from the parent tree. Ethereum’s founding mythmaker, Vitalik Buterin (often called “Vitalik” or “V God”), emerged from the Bitcoin world—initially as co-founder and writer for *Bitcoin Magazine*, engaging with the community, contributing to various projects, before eventually forging his own path.
Ethereum extended Bitcoin’s vision of sovereignty into programmability. Where Bitcoin represents “opting out of the system,” Ethereum embodies “building a new system from scratch.” Bitcoin’s scripting language is limited, optimized for scarcity; Ethereum is a general-purpose, Turing-complete virtual machine, enabling infinite possibilities. This “infinite garden” mindset forms the mythological basis of Ethereum as the world computer—a platform empowering people to build new systems, new worlds, and new paradigms. Seeds of decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) were already encoded in Ethereum’s DNA. What they needed was generations of mythmakers to nurture them.
Ethereum officially launched on July 30, 2015. Its genesis block contained the same message as Bitcoin’s: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,” paying homage to its predecessor and further cementing their shared lineage.
What makes Ethereum’s mythmaking unique is how it expands the myth by building upon it. One of the earliest mythmakers besides Vitalik was Joe Lubin, who founded ConsenSys. This startup studio incubated essential early tools like MetaMask, Infura, and Truffle, dramatically improving the developer experience on Ethereum. Moreover, ConsenSys brought hundreds of Ethereum developers to Brooklyn and New York City, planting the seeds for the city to become one of the world’s leading crypto hubs. At its peak, ConsenSys employed over 1,200 people. Though the company later downsized and shifted its mission, its early work laid the groundwork for Ethereum’s subsequent waves of prosperity.
The Current State of Mythmaking in Bitcoin and Ethereum
Bitcoin’s simplicity allows new mythmakers to craft fresh narratives. For example, Michael Saylor picked up the torch, ushering Bitcoin into the Wall Street era. Today, Bitcoin exists as a regulated ETF and has gained recognition from traditional finance.
Ethereum, being more complex, features layered mythmaking. This complexity manifests in successive eras—ICO season, DeFi Summer, NFT boom, DAO revival—all reflecting different visions of what kind of world to build atop Ethereum, while maintaining continuity with its roots.
Yet in recent years, Ethereum’s myth has significantly weakened, as energy has dispersed. Attention and mindshare have fractured across Layer 2s and alternative Layer 1s—chains that, just a few years ago, would have built directly on Ethereum itself. While L2s were always part of the roadmap and implemented as planned, in practice, they represent a break from Ethereum’s prior lineage. I’d even argue that today’s L2s are spiritually L1s—but that’s a discussion for another time.
Marketing Is Not Mythmaking
Worse still, we’ve seen a recurring playbook prioritizing metrics over narrative: blockchain projects raise massive funds, run short-term, optimization-driven marketing campaigns, launch, conduct token generation events (TGEs), and then watch helplessly as their ecosystems evaporate. This is unsustainable—and the more often it happens, the greater the risk of self-destruction within the crypto industry. In the pursuit of data, mythmaking is replaced by marketing, and powerful myths are substituted with cheap slogans.
What we see today are superficial goals designed to attract mercenary participants. Metrics once signaling genuine progress have been gamed into irrelevance. Users are treated as data points to optimize, not souls to inspire. It’s a Faustian bargain that leads us straight to user attrition and disillusionment.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with marketing—it’s a time-tested practice in other industries. The problem arises when marketers enter crypto without understanding the cultural context or foundational story. Marketing without myth is at best hollow, at worst predatory. For crypto—and especially for Ethereum—to emerge from this stagnation, we must move beyond pure marketing thinking.
Conclusion
Mythmaking is the spiritual infrastructure that binds communities together and sustains them. It gives individuals purpose and a sense of belonging. Yet in many corners of the industry, this truth has been forgotten, replaced by cold metrics and short-lived spikes in attention optimized for immediate gains but failing at long-term retention.
But not all hope is lost. We can awaken from our collective amnesia and restart the process of mythmaking. There are countless examples to learn from, imitate, and adapt. We can swing the pendulum back toward meaning—but only if we stop deceiving ourselves.
I want to see a world with thousands of mythmakers weaving stories together—an active community symphony where technology and culture are continuously co-created through collaboration. A renaissance of creative storytelling and mythmaking is within reach. But we can only achieve it if we stop limiting ourselves in isolation and instead begin taking meaningful action—together.
Join TechFlow official community to stay tuned
Telegram:https://t.me/TechFlowDaily
X (Twitter):https://x.com/TechFlowPost
X (Twitter) EN:https://x.com/BlockFlow_News
@DeFiDave22
