Original title: “From Hong Kong to Denver, Ethereum is entering the ‘Dunkirk Moment'”

Author: Jocy, founder of IOSG Ventures

I believe you have seen many of the last two weeks Consensus HK I will not repeat it, but I can summarize most of it as correct.The industry was disappointed that there was no prospect of breaking the situation and believed that it had reached a bear market.That week was also a feast for P players and KOL gods. The impact of my trip to Hong Kong was rationality. Those young players and gods who work harder than funds and entrepreneurs deserve so much, and they are Surrealist investors, they can always put a perfect end to every transaction. The trading principle of many P players is 90% or BTC, and maintaining PVP and sprint at all times for 10% of active sol positions. No matter how much they make each time, they will implement such position allocation. Because of the meme wave and the attention economy, this has become the most lively discussion in Hong Kong.

Kaito’s victory ushered in their golden era for KOL, where attention was priced and could be quickly cashed out.In sharp contrast, the entire Ethereum ecosystem is lifeless and the clarion call of hollowing out and idealization is no one to follow. This is a blow to reality. So-called value investors are deeply trapped, and long-term holders have begun to be short of Ethereum and have turned to Solana.Many people can’t see the Hungry level of Ethereum entrepreneurs (in contrast to Solana, when a dev goes to L2/Ethereum and asks for a connection, it takes an average of two weeks, but it generally takes less than two days to complete the connection and start communication with the Sol Foundation), this seems to be deliberately done by the masters of the encryption industry,In this small cycle of the bull market, long-term holders are not encouraged but short-term traders are given better returns, but in my opinion, this is a warning for industry leaders such as Ethereum’s inaction or lack of crisis awareness, and the market is sounding the alarm.

The prevalence of short-termism: the collapse of industry values

At the same time, when everyone shed their pretense and wanted to make a fortune when the bull market ended, many people began to have no ideals/beliefs and became ruthless arbitrage tools.No one cares about the future of the industry. Everyone wants to make the last sum of money in this cycle.In order to support the currency prices and chains of their own projects, exchanges can abandon the listing standards and list some of their investment projects; Tianwang projects regard tge as the last cash machine, and market makers have also become the winning generals in this cycle. Relying on BD and brands, they can always get chips for free and with the overall VC currency downward, the average median size of mm can get a net income of nearly 40 meters;It seems that everything is moving from long-term to short-term bubbles and speculators, and these people’s practices are having a more profound impact on some people who insist on building entrepreneurs.

This moment is very similar to 2018/2022. It is deserted and very deserted, and practitioners leave because they cannot see hope and recognition in the industry.Everyone is doing everything possible to continue to survive in the bear market. Teams that are still starting and doing things will be very painful for them. They need firmness and values all the time.Trump influenced core values across the United States, and the crypto industry inspired huge nihilism after Trump token.While practitioners and speculators believe that this is a fast and short-term game, everyone also targets how much cash they can take before the money game button is pressed.

Summarizing the trip to Hong Kong, it was a great failure of etiquette and joy in the industry. It was also a formal written trial of Ethereum. As the most successful entrepreneur in the industry, did he have a good grasp of the bow of the industry and led the industry towards nihilism?

Challenges and Transformation of the Ethereum Ecosystem

Too long to watch the version: Denver infra’s founder is very bearish, but the app and AI founders are both bullish.

During my trip to Denver, I still saw many shocking scenes.Some of the founders and developers who have been building steadily for many years were suddenly told that the Qing Dynasty was about to die. They chose not to believe this. It seems that the Ethereum ecosystem has always had a culture of arranging arrangements. They have raised funds smoothly all the way. They have also seen many projects that are not as good as theirs have performed well in the speculative market of tokens. They may never have thought that one day they will not be able to raise money and the coins they issue will return to zero like other air coins. When the runway had only the last 6 to 9 months left, I slowly understood that I wanted to truly build a product with revenue and user base, and began to seriously think about what the problem with Ethereum was.

Of course, it is never too late, but it requires drastic layoffs and a complete denial of who they were in the past. This is a huge challenge for the founder, because he is just betting in an uncertain direction, but he has to risk everything he has for this.According to incomplete statistics, the current financing amount of projects deeply cultivated and built on the Ethereum and EVM ecosystem exceeds hundreds of billions of dollars, and the overall primary and secondary market valuation adds up to more than one trillion dollars. Therefore, the question facing these projects is, should we stay in Ethereum or leave? As strong as Konstantin, founder of Lido, when he announced on Twitter that he would establish the second Ethereum Foundation, he instantly received hundreds of DMs (including Uniswap) from founders such as Ethereum ecosystem defi. Of course, this is still very challenging for consensus.

In addition, I saw a wave of Ethereum eco-entrepreneurs. In the past, they have always been the mainstay of the industry’s technical faction. The technical products and solutions they have made have been widely adopted. Whether it is TEE/zkTLS/rollup, they are all the only ones.But these people are tired of it. Providing no matter how good a solution is for technical agreements that have no end users and needs will not help him bring real entrepreneurial fun. What excites him now is the exciting new paper that appears in the field of AI research.To be honest, there are not a few such founders, and these are one of the few founders who can truly deeply cultivate in the industry and make feasible solutions.If a large number of such founders choose to leave and leave, I think the impact on the entire Ethereum infrastructure will go back at least three to five years.

The wonderful energy of the integration of AI and Web3

At first, everyone was saying that Denver infra had no hot spots or interest, but as we chatted about 3 to 4 new AI* Web3 projects every day,We have seen the Ethereum community’s active embrace of emerging technologies such as AI, as well as innovative attempts in areas such as DeTraning/Inference/DePIN. Ethereum is actively adapting to new technology trends and exploring new application scenarios.

Capital and entrepreneurs have become the prophets of the industry. Paradigm has led the investment in Web3 LLM company Nous research with a valuation of US$1 billion. Groq has generated more than US$1 billion in revenue as Inference in the past year. Openmind has teamed up with Yushu Technology to create RobotAI. DePAI’s open source products were unveiled in Denver, and Hyperbolic has also become one of the inference networks with the highest integration support among web3 developers. There are also open source Intelligence platforms such as Open Gradient and Pluralis. At Ethereum conferences like Denver, smart developers and founders have begun to comprehensively help Web3 embrace AI. Everyone is interested in how Brainstorm can make AI agents and more applications appear in the Web3 scene. The industry never ends or stops, and research and curiosity have always driven those builders further and further.

Openmind teamed up with Yushu Technology to create RobotAI, and DePAI’s open source product was unveiled at denver

Macroscopic benefits and slow release, Crypto keeps pace with the times

However, after dealing with most American institutions, the scene is completely different from that in Asia. Everyone remains very optimistic about the bull market and easing environment for crypto policy.Bank of America’s policy on accepting custody of crypto assets has been passed, and soon banks will gradually allow BTC/ETH to be mortgaged, and will even expand to mining equipment. Here we can see a clear trendAn environment for encrypted interest rate cuts is about to take shape. The original industry borrowing rate of 10% can be adjusted to around 3 – 4%, and even Japan can reach negative interest rates, which will bring liquidity back to the industry.

In addition, we have recently seen favorable encryption policies in the United States.Both Uniswap and Coinbase are considering designing tokenized securities models to allow investors in traditional industries to better evaluate and purchase tokens.The benefits released by regulation will far exceed our imagination in this cycle, so I am very optimistic that the market will usher in a very good macro environment in the next two years.

Many people say that this bull market is over, but I don’t see it that way. Every bull market not only has the cooperation of macro markets, but also the emergence of self-innovation and new applications in the endogenous market of encryption.We have not seen real innovation in this cycle, so if there is no such thing, it will be a fake bull market.In the next two years, we can expect more traditional companies/even state regimes to enter the L2 network and issue their own decentralized networks.The prosperity of L2 business has once again driven the growth and value capture of Ethereum L1.

Rebuilding Ethereum governance: moving towards mainstream and commercialization

On the third day of Denver, I attended the Pragma held by ETHGlobal and met several core EF developers who revealed the upcoming new organizational structure adjustments of Ethereum. What is more interesting here is @dannyryan. His reputation and voice in the core developer circle of Ethereum in the past are obvious to all. Then the newly established @Etherealize will also shoulder the mission of Consensus in the new era, helping Ethereum move towards the mainstream world and commercialization;In addition, two Co-EDs from the foundation, Hsiao-Wei

@hwwonx has also been deeply involved in Ethereum for many years, and has been following Vitalik to fight north and south since 2016 (Photo on the 2019 Ethereum hackathon selection day in Beijing, the one sitting next to vitalik is),In addition, Tomasz @tkstanczak, as the founder of Nethermind, is very familiar with the entire Ethereum ecosystem project. As third-party dev shops, they understand the more sustainable survival business logic, which can help Ethereum find a balance between infra and commercialization.

In fact, Vitalik encountered the same problems as all entrepreneurs. The team became bigger and it was difficult to lead.Friends who know how to study personal personality characteristics can try to analyze God V’s mental journey. From Milady’s Twitter avatar to her disappointment with encrypted OG, she replaced him with World of Warcraft’s half-man, half-bird image of Druid, which also represents His inner reconciliation with the voices of the community, and the new team structure of Ethereum was officially announced the next day. um may be the first truly decentralized organization and economy in history,We should be more tolerant of this man who is just thirty. He does not have any particularly outstanding performance in organizational structure management and commercialization of Ethereum applications, but who can lead this organization can create more brilliance and results?

Perhaps Ethereum can also learn from Elon musk and create a DOGE Commission for Discipline Inspection, which is specifically responsible for abolishing some irresponsible dev and vacant posts. How to measure the value of contribution and KPIs is an important issue in front of God V. In addition, internal core developers will be given a clearer value proposition and development needs, and the management team will be given more specific roadmap and management time limit requirements to better return Ethereum to community and elected governance. As the cornerstone of Web3, Ethereum is also actively exploring Layer2 solutions and technology upgrades to cope with growing application needs.

There has never been a savior, God V needs to encourage more application entrepreneurs

For Ethereum, is current technology research and development so important? Maybe it is important in 2017, 2020, and 2022, but applications should be more important than technology now.The next most important milestone for Ethereum and the greatest confidence for ecological builders will be whether Ethereum, as the world’s computer, can produce super application products that transcend the times.

Many people regard Vitalik as the savior of Ethereum. Ethereum is the savior of the industry, but there has never been a savior. Everyone should be the savior. I urged in my last tweet,All organizations that have obtained generous capital accumulation and stable business income in this industry should actually contribute to the future of this industry. They can donate to some open source organizations in Ethereum, or create better opportunities for young people in the industry.In addition to using Grants to support, many entrepreneurs still need financing support. In this wave of industry altcoins, it has also dealt a heavy blow to the already shaky Asian funds. Many funds have begun to suspend operations or transform into second-level enterprises. Asian entrepreneurship The environment is difficult, and if Asian institutions are lost to invest in VCs, the industry will be even thinner. Here, I still appeal that Ethereum’s ecological organization must not lack early venture capital support, and suggest that all exchanges can allocate 1 to 2% of their revenue every year to support the development and innovation of the Ethereum open source ecosystem.

Will Ethereum die out in the next Bull-Bear cycle?I don’t think so. This is the most successful decentralized organization in the Web3 industry, and we should not let it fail. Its failure means that hundreds of billions to trillions of talents and project assets built on the Ethereum business empire will need to be rebuilt. The entire industry will fall into a major setback of 5 to 10 years, which means that many OGs will leave.

Please be reluctant to sell your Ethereum. If you look back on what happened from 2020 to 2030 in a 10-year dimension, you may see that the doubts and uproar in 2025 were actually insignificant. How to judge value and innovation in a 10-year dimension is a priority worth considering.

Optimistic people are often right, and the more difficult and ups and downs the times are, the more we should maintain confidence and optimism.

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