Author: Mirror Tang, ZEROBASE CEO

Here comes the homework, frontline reporter Mirror has compiled the highlights of the 2026 Hong Kong WEB3 Carnival for you.

• Stormy Tony B's event squeezed out a shoe
• K Line Master travels with bodyguards, C language explodes
• Shizuka kisses Takizawa Laura passionately
• CZ's good brother, Mr. Qiang, meets BN CEO warmly after many years
• Bitget CEO was surprisingly used as a container by a cleaning lady
• Chinese Buffett appears at the carnival, earning millions daily
• Pyramid scheme boss passionately sings on the main stage "Happy Planet"
• Ethereum founder performs a high jump and softly squats down

Absurd things are not laughable because absurdity itself is part of the problem. But if we treat these phenomena as isolated jokes, we actually underestimate the problem.

The current farce essentially arises from misaligned incentives—the current Web3 reward structure is extremely friendly to short-term behaviors, where attention means everything.

Posting a meme along with a narrative, KOL, liquidity can complete a profit loop in just a few days.

• In contrast, building a Layer2, DeFi protocol, or RWA infrastructure requires long-term development, auditing, security testing, with cycles measured in months or even years, all while bearing the risk of the direction being falsified.

The return curves of these two pathways are entirely different.

The former has high certainty and quick realization, while the latter has strong uncertainty and long realization cycles.

In such an environment, the flow of resources is almost inevitable.

When the returns from price pumping exceed those from product iteration, and when narrative can replace utility, project parties are more inclined to invest in marketing, KOL, and traffic, rather than engineering, architecture, and security.

This is a rational choice.

Attention has become the most important production factor in the current stage.

Traffic can be converted into consensus, consensus can be converted into price, and price can be directly converted into funds. KOL, as the distribution nodes of attention, essentially take on the role of liquidity entry.

Project parties pay for this, or exchange in the form of tokens, essentially purchasing market activation capabilities.

From this perspective, marketing itself is not an issue.

In the early stage of the industry, marketing can reduce cold start costs and quickly gather users, funds, and developers. Many projects later regarded as "successful cases" relied on strong narratives for early activation.

The problem arises after marketing decouples from product value.

When narratives only serve the exit paths, without corresponding genuine user value or protocol accumulation, the market turns toward a zero-sum or even negative-sum structure. Latecomers provide liquidity for early entrants but leave no sustainable network effects.

At the same time, the technology pathway also has risks.

Wrong directional choices, products that no one uses, and unsustainable long-term maintenance all lead to more hidden but longer-term resource waste.

Thus, the problem does not lie in the opposition between marketing and technology.

A more accurate description is:

The current industry's incentive structure makes short-term narrative + liquidity harvesting returns significantly higher than long-term product + user value accumulation.

Under this premise, rational project parties prioritize resource allocation to market and narrative, rather than product depth and security. This change in resource allocation also explains, to some extent, why the frequency of security incidents has increased.

Another trend worth noting is talent mobility.

When the returns from long-term building are unappealing, high-quality entrepreneurs will turn to other tracks, such as AI, where funding supply, social recognition, and long-term expectations are more stable.

This also explains why the current industry atmosphere is starting to change.

Conferences are gradually shifting from technical exchanges to resource matchmaking and traffic distribution, with event formats becoming more sales-oriented rather than R&D-oriented.

The continued influx of institutional funds is one of the few positive signals of this conference.

However, in a retail-dominated market structure, KOL-driven narrative mechanisms still dominate, making short-term noise hard to dissipate.

For entrepreneurs, a question that needs rethinking is:

Marketing is essentially a mechanism for attention allocation and liquidity organization, while technology determines whether the system can exist long-term.

When the two are disconnected, the industry will be imbalanced.

When the two realign, the cycle may enter the next stage.

I love you WEB3, more than I love myself!

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