Check crypto Twitter, there's no money-making effect anymore
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Check crypto Twitter, there's no money-making effect anymore
Games have become more efficient, value extraction mechanisms more mature, and attention more fragmented.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Lauris
Translation: TechFlow
Welcome to the "Post-Crypto Twitter" era
Here, "Crypto Twitter" (CT) refers specifically to Crypto Twitter as a market discovery and capital allocation engine, not the broader crypto community on Twitter.
"Post-Crypto Twitter" (Post-CT) does not mean the disappearance of discussion, but rather that Crypto Twitter, as a "coordination mechanism through discourse," is gradually losing its ability to consistently generate major market events.
A single culture cannot sustainably attract new participants if it no longer produces enough clear winners.
The "major market events" mentioned here are not cases like "a token's price tripled," but refer instead to situations where the attention of most liquidity market participants converges on the same thing. Within this framework, Crypto Twitter once served as a mechanism that transformed public narratives into coordinated flows around a dominant meta-narrative. The significance of the "Post-Crypto Twitter" era is that this transformation mechanism no longer functions reliably.
I'm not trying to predict what comes next. Frankly, I don't have a clear answer. This article aims to explain why the previous model worked, why it's now decaying, and what this means for how the crypto industry might reorganize itself.
Why did Crypto Twitter work?
Crypto Twitter (CT) was important because it compressed three market functions into a single interface.
The first function of CT is narrative discovery. CT is a high-bandwidth salience mechanism. "Salience" isn't just an academic synonym for "interesting"—it's a market term describing how attention converges on what currently matters.
In practice, Crypto Twitter created focal points. It compressed a vast hypothesis space into a small set of "actionable now" objects. This compression solved a coordination problem.
In more mechanical terms: Crypto Twitter transformed scattered, private attention into visible, public common knowledge. If you see ten credible traders discussing the same asset, you don't just know it exists—you also know others know it exists, and know that others know you know it exists. In liquid markets, this common knowledge is crucial.
As Herbert A. Simon said:
"The wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."
The second function of Crypto Twitter is acting as trust routing. In crypto markets, most assets lack strong intrinsic value anchors in the short term. Therefore, capital cannot be allocated purely on fundamentals, but flows through people, reputation, and ongoing signals. "Trust routing" is an informal infrastructure determining whose claims are believed early enough to matter.
This isn't mystical—it's a rough reputation function continuously computed by thousands of participants in public view. People infer who got in early, who has good prior judgment, who has access to resources, and whose behavior correlates with positive expected value (Positive EV). This reputation layer made capital allocation possible without formal due diligence, serving as a simplified tool for selecting counterparties.
Notably, Crypto Twitter's trust mechanism doesn't depend solely on "follower count." It's a combination of follower numbers, who follows you, quality of replies, whether credible people engage with you, and whether your predictions withstand real-world validation. Crypto Twitter makes these signals highly visible at near-zero cost.
Crypto Twitter features both public trust, and over time, certain communities have developed stronger preferences for private trust.
The third function of Crypto Twitter is converting narratives into capital allocation via reflexivity. Reflexivity is key to this core cycle: narratives drive price, price validates narrative, validation attracts more attention, attention brings more buyers, and the loop self-reinforces—until it collapses.
This is where market microstructure comes into play. Narratives don't abstractly push the "market"—they push order flow. When a large group is convinced by a narrative that something is "key," marginal participants express this belief through buying.
When this cycle is strong enough, the market temporarily rewards alignment with consensus over deep analysis. In hindsight, Crypto Twitter was almost like a "low-IQ Bloomberg Terminal": a single feed merging salience, trust, and capital allocation.
Why was the "monoculture" era possible?
The "monoculture" era existed because it had a repeatable structure. Each cycle revolved around an object simple enough for mass understanding, yet broad enough to capture most of the ecosystem’s attention and liquidity. I like to call these objects "toys."
"Toys" here is not pejorative, but structural. Think of them as games—easy to explain, easy to join, and inherently social (almost like expansion packs for MMORPGs). A "toy" has low barriers to entry and high narrative compressibility—you can explain it to a friend in one sentence.
"Meta" emerges when a "toy" becomes a shared game board. Meta refers to the dominant strategy set and the central object around which most participants converge. The monoculture was powerful because this meta wasn’t just "popular"—it was a shared game across users, developers, traders, and VCs. Everyone played the same game, just at different layers of the stack.
@icobeast wrote an excellent piece on the cyclical and evolving nature of "trendy things," which I highly recommend reading.
https://x.com/icobeast/status/1993721136325005596
The market system we’ve experienced requires a "window of inefficiency" where people can quickly make "unbelievable wealth."
In the early stages of each cycle, the market isn’t fully efficient because the infrastructure for mass participation in the meta hasn’t been fully built. Opportunities exist but haven’t yet filled all market niches. This is crucial because widespread wealth accumulation needs a window where many participants can enter—not face a fully hostile environment from day one.
As George Akerlof noted in "The Market for Lemons":
"Information asymmetry between buyers and sellers causes markets to deviate from efficiency."
The point is, for this system to work, you need a market that’s highly efficient for some, while being a classic "lemons market" (full of information asymmetry and inefficiency) for others.
The monoculture system also required massive shared context, which Crypto Twitter provided. Shared context is rare online, where attention is typically fragmented. But when a monoculture forms, attention concentrates. This concentration reduces coordination costs and amplifies reflexivity.
As F. A. Hayek wrote in "The Use of Knowledge in Society":
"The information we must use about circumstances never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but merely as dispersed fragments of incomplete and often contradictory knowledge held by individuals."
In other words, forming shared context allows market participants to coordinate more efficiently, fueling the monoculture’s rise.
Why was the "single meta-narrative" once so credible? When fundamentals weakly constrain markets, salience becomes a stronger constraint than valuation. The primary market question isn’t "What’s it worth?" but "What are we all paying attention to? Is this trade already too crowded?"
A rough analogy: mainstream culture once focused attention on a few shared objects (same TV shows, chart-topping music, celebrities). Now, attention splinters into niches and subcultures—people no longer share the same reference sets at scale. Similarly, Crypto Twitter as a mechanism is undergoing a parallel shift: top-level shared context is shrinking, while localized contexts emerge in smaller circles.
Why is the "Post-Crypto Twitter" era arriving?
The arrival of "Post-Crypto Twitter" (Post-CT) stems from the erosion of conditions that supported the "monoculture."
The first failure lies in "toys" being cracked faster.
In past cycles, the market learned the rules and industrialized them. Once rules are industrialized, inefficiency windows close faster and last shorter. The result: returns become more extreme—fewer winners, more structural losers.
Memecoins exemplify this dynamic. As an asset class, they work because they’re low-complexity and highly reflexive. But precisely these traits make memecoins easy to mass-produce. Once the production line matures, the meta-narrative becomes an assembly line.
Market microstructure has evolved. The median participant no longer trades against other retail investors, but against systems. By the time they enter, information is widely disseminated, liquidity pools are pre-seeded, trading paths optimized, insiders positioned, and exit routes pre-calculated. In such an environment, the median participant’s expected return is squeezed to near zero.
In short, most of the time, you’re just someone else’s "exit liquidity."
A useful mental model: early-cycle order flow is driven mainly by naive retail investors; late-cycle order flow becomes increasingly adversarial and mechanistic. The same "toy" evolves into a completely different game at different stages.
A monoculture cannot persist if it fails to produce enough clear winners to attract the next wave of new participants.
The second failure is extraction overpowering creation
Here, "extraction" refers to actors and mechanisms capturing liquidity value rather than creating new liquidity.
In early cycles, new participants could add net liquidity and benefit, as market expansion outpaced value extraction. But in later cycles, new entrants often become net contributors to the extraction layer. Once this perception spreads, participation declines, weakening the reflexivity loop.
This explains the consistency of shifting market sentiment. If a market no longer offers broad, clear winning paths, overall mood deteriorates. In a market where the median participant feels "I’m just someone else’s liquidity," cynicism is rational.
To understand current retail sentiment, see this post by @Chilearmy123.
The third failure is attention fragmentation. When no single object captures the ecosystem’s attention, the market’s "discovery layer" loses clear salience. Participants fragment into narrower domains. This dispersion isn’t just cultural—it has real market consequences: liquidity splits across niches, price signals become less visible, and the dynamic of "everyone doing the same trade" vanishes.
Additionally, a brief mention: macroeconomic conditions affect the strength of reflexivity cycles. The monoculture era coincided with strong global risk appetite and ample liquidity, making speculative reflexivity appear "normal." But when capital costs rise and marginal buyers grow cautious, narrative-driven capital flows become harder to sustain.
What does "Post-Crypto Twitter" mean?
"Post-Crypto Twitter" (Post-CT) describes a new market environment where Crypto Twitter is no longer the primary ecosystem-wide coordination mechanism for capital allocation, nor the core engine concentrating on-chain markets around a single meta-narrative.
In the monoculture era, Crypto Twitter repeatedly linked narrative consensus with liquidity concentration at scale. In the Post-CT era, this link is weaker and more intermittent. Crypto Twitter remains meaningful as a discovery platform and reputation signal, but it’s no longer the reliable engine synchronizing the entire ecosystem around "one trade," "one toy," or "one shared context."
In other words, Crypto Twitter can still generate narratives, but only a few achieve large-scale "common knowledge," and even fewer convert into synchronized order flow. When this mechanism breaks down, the market may still have activity, but it feels subjectively "quieter."
This explains the shift in subjective experience. Markets now feel slower, more professional, because broad coordination has vanished. Emotional shifts largely reflect changing expected value (EV) conditions. The market’s "quietness" doesn’t mean inactivity—it reflects the absence of narratives and synchronized actions capable of triggering systemic resonance.
The evolution of Crypto Twitter: From engine to interface
Crypto Twitter (CT) won’t disappear—it will evolve in function.
In earlier market systems, CT sat upstream of capital flows, partially directing market movements. In today’s system, CT resembles an "interface layer": it broadcasts reputation signals, surfaces narratives, and aids trust routing, but actual capital allocation decisions increasingly occur within higher-trust "subgraphs."
These subgraphs aren’t mysterious—they’re dense networks with higher-quality information and frequent interaction, such as small trading circles, niche communities, private chat groups, and institutional discussion spaces. In this system, Crypto Twitter acts more like a surface-level "façade," while real social and trading activity happens within the underlying social network layer.
This also explains a common misconception: "Crypto Twitter is declining" usually means "Crypto Twitter is no longer the main place for average participants to profit." Wealth now accumulates more in high-information-quality, restricted-access environments with more private trust mechanisms, rather than through noisy, public trust calculations.
Nonetheless, you can still achieve significant gains by posting on Crypto Twitter and building a personal brand (some of my friends and nodes do and continue to do so). But real value accrual now comes from building your social graph, becoming a trusted participant, and gaining access to "backstage layers."
In short, surface-level branding still matters, but core competitiveness has shifted to building and participating in "backstage trust networks."
I don’t know what comes next
I won’t pretend to know exactly what the next "monoculture" will be. In fact, I doubt a monoculture will re-form in the same way, at least under current market conditions. The mechanisms that once nurtured monocultures have degraded.
My intuition may carry subjectivity and situational bias based on what I observe now. Yet these dynamics began emerging earlier this year.
There are certainly active areas now—naming attention-grabbing categories isn’t hard. But I won’t list them, as it adds little to the discussion. Overall, apart from presales and initial allocations, the trend we see is that the most overvalued categories are often "adjacent" to Crypto Twitter (CT), rather than directly driven by it.
Conclusion
We have entered the "Post-Crypto Twitter" (Post-CT) era.
Not because Crypto Twitter is "dead," nor because discussion has lost meaning, but because the structural conditions enabling recurring systemic "monocultures" have weakened. The game has become more efficient, value extraction mechanisms more mature, attention more fragmented, and reflexivity more localized than systemic.
The crypto industry continues, and Crypto Twitter persists. My claim is narrow: the era where Crypto Twitter reliably coordinated the entire market around a shared meta-narrative, generating widespread, low-barrier nonlinear returns, has at least temporarily ended. And I believe the likelihood of this phenomenon recurring in the next few years is significantly reduced.
This doesn’t mean you can’t profit, nor that crypto is over. It’s neither pessimism nor cynicism. In fact, I’ve never been more optimistic about the industry’s future. My point is that future market distributions and salience mechanisms will differ fundamentally from the past few years.
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