BTC is digital gold, and ETH is the world's computer.
Author: PAUL VERADITTAKIT
Translator: Block unicorn
The blockchain has now reached the "good enough" stage.
Transaction costs have dropped to less than $0.01 per transaction, and after EIP-4844, Solana, Avax, Sei, Sui, and L2 are expected to achieve this. On-chain throughput may be sufficient, with many blockchains claiming to process over 10-50K transactions per second (TPS), but this only becomes a significant factor when reaching the TPS limit, which may not happen for the next 3-5 years. With account abstraction and wallets (such as Rabby, Zerion, and Backpack), the path to a better user experience is now clear.
For the new Layer 1 (L1) and Layer 2 (L2), it is difficult to find differentiation. After meeting these basic threshold requirements, everything becomes a competition for attention and "follower" communities. The best example is - religion, a model of a powerful follower community.
So, how can one become the next religion? How can one become the next BTC/ETH/SOL?
Every religion needs a leader
No one knows, ETH has a genius boy Vitalik, whose blog posts are considered as the Bible. SOL has Anatoly, who debates with ETH geeks on Twitter every day.
Perhaps the best example here is the infamous LUNA, a controversial cult leader - Do Kwon or DK (R.I.P) who ridicules every naysayer. Cardano (ADA) is another good example, as it hosts live streams in sunny Colorado every week.
The leaders of the blockchain have become legendary figures, passing on this ideological system and describing the future development in the form of a white paper. When these legendary figures or leaders pass away, this ideology becomes even stronger. Satoshi Nakamoto "died," but the ideology of BTC has become stronger than ever. If Vitalik were to pass away, ETH would still continue to exist and thrive as a decentralized world computer.
I find that projects like AICoin have a problem in that they lack a central figure to worship or rely on. This is also the reason why the L2 of ETH is in trouble, as they rely on the myth of ETH but are followers of existing religions. Therefore, I believe that ETH L2 still needs strong marketing from centralized exchanges like Base and Coinbase, as their community is not as strong as L1.
Every religion needs a near-death experience and a resurrection
Jesus was nailed to the cross but rose from the dead. BTC experienced its near-death moment in the Mt Gox hack, but miraculously made a comeback. ETH had the DAO hack, where 14% of ETH was locked in the contract, and then the community proposed a fork to create a new ETH chain, leading to a rapid recovery and becoming stronger. SOL is closely linked to FTX, and when FTX fell, SOL dropped from $35 to $9, being seen as the next LUNA. However, now we see its resurrection.
Escaping from a near-death experience eliminates everyone except the most loyal supporters, forming the foundation of your most ardent followers.
LUNA fell and never came back (but there are still fanatics of "Luna Classic"). FTM also fell, but it lacked a mythical figure, looking more like Andre Cronje (AC) than Michael Kong, FTM's CEO. Fortunately, other chains have not (unfortunately) experienced a near-death blow, as many chains are still too new, including L2.
Enriching early believers, such as increasing wealth a hundredfold
Rising prices are the best business development strategy. If you make people rich, they will become your biggest supporters. Bitcoin brought over 200 times growth to its early adopters from 2013 to 2018, forming its core followers. Ethereum grew about 40 times from 2020 to 2022, enriching its ICO supporters, a diverse group who chose Ethereum from hundreds of other ICO projects.
On the other hand, SOL saw a rise of about 100 times in the previous cycle, but most of it was held by venture capital firms rather than the community, so its grassroots influence is not as strong as ETH. Unexpected airdrops like JTO and PYTH enriched the Solana community, where those staking 1 SOL received $10,000 worth of JTO. They made the little guys who could only afford 1 SOL wealthy, rather than distributing based on the amount of staked SOL, which favored the rich. Note that most airdrops (or related points) do not enrich the community, only unexpected airdrops do.
During the bear market, L2's ARB and OP also had quite successful airdrops. This is clearly a positive feedback loop, where price increases attract more enthusiastic supporters and attention, leading to another price increase.
From now on, I will study how TIA can leverage the momentum brought by airdrops and subsequent 10x price actions. Early Celestia developers can now receive about $200,000 in airdrops. On the other hand, SEI messed up their airdrop and lost early community members, but is now slowly rebuilding. Aptos and Sui are also venture chains, so they need an excellent airdrop strategy to win the support of an organic community.
Building a religious community using memes and unique identifiers
Even with financial incentives, you need memes that spread quickly and are easy to spread. You need some inside jokes so people feel they belong to a unique club. You need people to blindly support the "greater cause" because they feel a sense of belonging.
Nothing illustrates this better than the "laser eyes" BTC geeks (laser eyes can be said to be a cultural attribute of the Bitcoin community, strongly advocating the consensus of Bitcoin). For Ethereum, there are ".eth" X names (referring to many Twitter user nicknames with the suffix .eth). With SOL, people will use "◎" or ".sol" - the Solana way, but not many people use it. But now BONK, dogwifhat, Popcat, and others are leading the Solana culture. You also have 0xmert basically living on X, mocking every Ethereum geek. AVAX has "🔺" X names, while OP and ARB use 🔴 and 💙 💛 instead.
Memes must naturally grow from the community, you cannot force memes onto the community. You can't just add "Inu" to the end of a token and consider it a successful project (because of Shiba Inu, many meme coins have "Inu" at the end of their names, thinking they are successful memes). For example, "Solana inu" didn't take off, but $BONK and $WIF did. The Base community performed surprisingly well with $BALD, it was original and somewhat amusing, but unfortunately turned out to be a scam.
You need a leader with extraordinary charisma and strong storytelling abilities to kickstart the flywheel and lay the foundation for your followers. Then, it becomes a positive feedback loop: early community → memes and culture → price increase → more community → more memes → price increase → more community.
The closest thing I've seen to a "religious community" outside of the profession is Berachain (Bear Chain). These people just understand crypto humor and community. SEI has performed quite well in multiple "Sei" puns, such as the $SEIYAN community even launching an ecosystem fund. Sui and Aptos are lacking in this aspect, but I believe it will come with the increase in numbers.
A simple narrative or catchphrase as a battle cry
To spread your religious belief, you need a simple phrase to market it. BTC is "digital gold," ETH is the "world's computer." SOL is "parallel processing" or "ETH killer." Recently, there have been some strong statements - "modular blockchain" led by Celestia, and "parallel EVM" by SEI and Monad.
Telling people you have a "parallel EVM" (still EVM, but faster chain operation) is much easier than telling them that EIP-4844 will reduce the data cost of Ethereum Rollups by introducing a blob submitted through KZG.
Summary
The success of blockchain comes down to a strong community. A community composed of developers, speculators, and users. And the strongest community is a religion.
With over 240 L1/L2s and only a few original applications, blockchain faces fierce competition in attracting attention. Technology is no longer a differentiating factor. Blast doesn't talk much about their tech stack (nobody cares) and focuses on their community and output, and there's a reason for that.
I wrote this article because everyone loves to speculate on L1/L2s, as there is a market premium (also the easiest narrative to understand when "investing in blockchain technology"). But in reality, I prefer to talk about real-world use cases.
So, which L1/L2 will become the biggest religion in the next cycle?
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