Recently, the just-concluded drama “Blossoms Shanghai（繁花）” has sparked a frenzy in the investment market, and has also prompted many people to start discussing Shanghai in the 1990s, especially Huanghe Road and the capital market in the Bund area. It not only represents Ah Bao’s golden age but also reflects the real portrayal of many social underdogs in the tide of change.

In fact, this is true for many industries - in the early stages, there are abundant opportunities, the scent of wealth is pervasive, and almost everywhere there are chances. However, as the stage of grassroots development gradually fades away, the good times become beautiful memories and face the common challenges of returning to normal.

“What we love is not the drama ‘Blossoms Shanghai’, but the era of abundant opportunities.” To some extent, the Web3 industry of the past decade is equivalent to the stock market of the 1990s. With the approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs and the continuous convergence of the Web3 industry towards the mainstream, is it time for the “flourishing era” of the crypto world to come to an end?

The glorious years in the crypto world

I believe many friends in the cryptocurrency industry have once imagined what they would do if they had the opportunity to go back 10 years and participate in this wave of era.

Accumulate BTC? Become a miner? Establish another Bitmain? Or become an early employee of Binance? The choices seem countless, but they all revolve around the grassroots decade of the cryptocurrency world, which was truly a golden age that exceeded the limits of imagination. It also gave birth to waves of industry legends and magnate myths.

Picture: CZ (first from right) takes a group photo with early practitioners in the industry

Among them, Binance is a typical example of a wealth effect explosion. It is worth noting that before its establishment in 2017, BN was relatively unknown and sought financing everywhere. Shortly after its establishment, it even faced criticism due to the decline in the price of BNB. In July 2017, BNB was launched with an initial price of 1 yuan, but soon fell below its issuance price, hitting a low of 0.5 yuan.

He Yi later recalled that was the most stressful period for CZ, “losing 10 kilograms in three weeks.” However, what no one expected was that in just about six months after its establishment, BN quickly became the world’s number one in terms of trading volume, and it continued to make remarkable progress.

In just four years, reaching its peak in 2021, the valuation of the company exceeded 300 billion US dollars for some former executives of BN, creating a large number of billionaires in addition to the founder.

In addition to the platform, the mining field is also a thriving derivative track. Take the founder of F2Pool, Shen Yu（Cobo）, as an example. He started mining with a laptop in his dormitory, then bought graphics cards to mine at home, and in 2013, he seized the opportunity of industry development and founded F2Pool. At one point, a 500 kW-scale F2Pool produced over 20,000 BTC and over 100,000 ETH.

As the beginning of the dream of the crypto world, the PoW mechanism bound Miner’s life and fortune to the development of BTC, making Miner the most staunch evangelist and defender of Bitcoin, giving BTC strong vitality, and becoming a crypto currency. The beginning of the world’s madness——Almost most of the early crypto giants and leading companies came from the mining field.

From a handful of 10-Thousand Bitcoiners to today’s Thousand Bitcoiners and Hundred Bitcoiners, from the “approachable bosses” such as block production bosses (Shenyu, etc.) and platform bosses (CZ, etc.) 6 years ago to today’s “approachable billionaires”. In just a few years, things have changed from what they used to be.

Recently, Hurun Reprot released the 2023 Rich List, and several big names from the domestic crypto industry made the list, including Wu Jihan, Li Lin, and Xu Mingxing:

Wu Jihan ranked 9th among the alumni of Peking University with 10 billion yuan; Li Lin ranked 3rd among the alumni of Tongji University with 7 billion yuan; Xu Mingxing ranked 16th among the alumni of Renmin University of China with 5 billion yuan.

Of course, today’s entire crypto industry has passed its initial rough days, and it may no longer be realistic to expect that the big guys will be able to get rich by participating in block production, providing block production machines, and so on.

However, for us ordinary investors, there are still many cost-effective options in the Web3 industry.

The best time was 10 years ago, the next best time is now

The most direct way is that in addition to producing blocks and collecting Tokens, the Airdrop form has emerged and become popular since the “DeFi Summer” of 2020.

This provides a new reward for participants who have a keen sense of smell and are willing to try new things. It is also a large amount of income unique to the circle in addition to operations such as hoarding tokens:

Uniswap (UNI) gave away an iPhone 12;

Meme (MEME) gave me a suite;

Tokenlon (LON) sent a luxurious dinner;

The Graph (GRT) curator event gave away a suite;

Including that in 2023, Blur sent a total of 360 million BLUR to more than 62,000 addresses that met its Airdrop conditions. Among them, the single address that received the most received 3.2 million BLUR. Calculated based on today’s market price, it exceeds 1.6 million US dollars, totaling 10 million yuan.

In addition, although ARB, TIA, and JTO airdrop have limited wealth-making effects from a single address, there are also stories of people getting rich through multiple addresses.

For the Web3 industry in the past three years, the practice of new products is not only to meet one’s own needs, but may also inadvertently lay the foundation for unexpected surprises in the future.

Just like in “Blossoms Shanghai”, Zhizhenyuan makes money from the information asymmetry, so the prosperity and decline of Zhizhenyuan and Yellow River Road are breathing the same breath and sharing the same fate: as long as the information asymmetry persists, in the era of blossom flowers, it will be “business as usual.” However, with the end of the era of chaos, the most obvious characteristic is the gradual elimination of information asymmetry.

And in the past year 2023, as the main narrative thread, Ordinals and memes, different from the traditional narrative logic of many previous large-scale investment and financing projects led by VCs, still provide the possibility of a shortcut for more ordinary people to participate, beyond OGs and whales.

In particular, the inscriptions and meme messages that flooded major WeChat groups once reminded people of the zoo market back in the day. In addition, spot ETFs also add new variables to the entire industry:

As the main channel for off-market incremental funds expected by the market, everyone hopes that ETFs can bring in a substantial amount of incremental funds, open up the traditional mainstream investors’ path to invest in cryptocurrencies, and promote the widespread acceptance of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin by Wall Street on a large scale, making crypto asset allocation more widely recognized.

It should be noted that in the Web2 world, whether it is Taobao or Amazon, top applications easily have hundreds of millions or even billions of buyers, while users of top Web3 applications such as MetaMask and ENS only hover around tens of millions or millions. Moreover, mainstream BTC holders are very few.

From this perspective, the Web3 industry is still a 24/7 stage, and after the launch of spot ETFs, it will still be a niche market in the next few years. The process of incremental entry still presents opportunities, and it is worth looking forward to what kind of exciting performances will be staged next.

Summary

For me personally, the most impressive sentence in “Blossoms Shanghai” is the sentence uncle Ye said to Mr. Bao:

“You know the Empire State Building in New York. It takes an hour to run from the bottom to the roof, but it only takes 8.8 seconds to jump from the roof. This is the stock. If you want to make money from stocks, you must first learn to lose.”

Since 2017, especially after the DeFi summer of 2020, in the crypto world, various types of stories have become the main narrative one after another - whether it is the golden shovel of DeFi, the sky-high price of small pictures of NFT, as well as the ups and downs of new public chains and the latest wave of Ordinals.

These rotating narratives constantly provide us, the general public, with new “get-rich-quick legends,” stirring our nerves. This is not only the norm in the world of crypto but also a sign that the golden age of Web3 has not yet come to an end.

Therefore, we in the Web3 industry must remember not to leave the poker table - “There are elevators to take the elevator, and there are stairs to climb the stairs.” As long as we continue to work hard on the field, one day we will usher in our own flourishing era.

Disclaimer：

1. This article is reprinted from [白话区块链]. All copyrights belong to the original author [Terry]. If there are objections to this reprint, please contact the Gate Learn team, and they will handle it promptly.
2. Liability Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not constitute any investment advice.
3. Translations of the article into other languages are done by the Gate Learn team. Unless mentioned, copying, distributing, or plagiarizing the translated articles is prohibited.