Author: Lauris

Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow

Welcome to the post-encrypted Twitter era.

The “Crypto Twitter” (CT) mentioned here refers to Crypto Twitter as a market discovery and capital allocation engine, rather than referring to the entire crypto community on Twitter.

"Post-CT" does not mean the disappearance of discussion, but rather that encrypted Twitter, as a "mechanism for coordinating through discourse," is gradually losing its ability to repeatedly generate significant market events.

A single culture cannot continue to attract the next wave of new participants if it can no longer produce enough significant winners.

The "major market event" mentioned here doesn't refer to something like "a token price tripling," but rather to a situation where most liquidity market participants are focused on the same thing. Within this framework, crypto Twitter was once a mechanism for transforming public narratives into a coordinated flow around a dominant meta-narrative. The significance of the "post-crypto Twitter" era lies in the fact that this transformation mechanism no longer reliably functions.

I'm not trying to predict what will happen next. Frankly, I don't have a definitive answer. The focus of this article is to explain why previous patterns worked, why they are declining, and what this means for the crypto industry to reorganize itself.

Why did encrypted Twitter work in the past?

Encrypted Twitter (CT) is important because it compresses three market functions into a single interface.

The first feature of encrypted Twitter is narrative discovery. CT is a high-bandwidth salience mechanism. “Salience” is not just an academic term for “interesting”, but a marketing term referring to how a graph converges to things that are currently worth paying attention to.

In practice, encrypted Twitter creates a focal point. It compresses a vast space of assumptions into a small subset of "operational at this moment." This compression solves a coordination problem.

To put it more mechanically: encrypted Twitter transforms decentralized, private attention into visible, public, shared knowledge. If you see ten trusted traders discussing the same object, you not only know that the object exists, but you also know that others know it exists, and that others know you know it exists. In liquid markets, this shared knowledge is crucial.

As Herbert A. Simon said:

"An abundance of information can lead to a lack of attention."

The second function of crypto Twitter is to act as a trust route. In the crypto market, most assets lack the characteristic of providing a strong intrinsic value anchor in the short term. Therefore, capital cannot be allocated solely based on fundamentals, but rather flows through people, reputation, and continuous signals. A "trust route" is an informal infrastructure that determines whose claims can be believed early enough to have an impact.

This is not a mysterious phenomenon, but a crude reputation function continuously calculated in public by thousands of participants. People infer who the early entrants are, who has good prior judgment, who has access to resources, and whose behavior is associated with positive expected value (EV). This reputation layer makes capital allocation possible without formal due diligence, as it serves as a simplified tool for selecting counterparties.

It's important to note that the trust mechanism on encrypted Twitter doesn't solely depend on the number of followers. It's a composite of factors: the number of followers, who follows you, the quality of your replies, whether credible people interact with you, and whether your predictions stand up to scrutiny. Encrypted Twitter makes these signals easily observable and extremely inexpensive.

While encrypted Twitter enjoys a degree of public trust, over time, some communities have also developed a greater emphasis on private trust.

The third function of encrypted Twitter is to transform narrative into capital allocation through reflexivity. Reflexivity is key to this core cycle: narrative drives prices, prices validate narrative, validation attracts more attention, attention brings more buyers, and this cycle continues to reinforce itself until it collapses.

This is where the market's microstructure comes into play. Narratives don't drive the "market" in an abstract way; they drive the flow of orders. If a large group is persuaded by a narrative to believe that a certain object is "key," then marginal participants will express this belief through purchases.

When this cycle is strong enough, the market will temporarily favor rewarding behavior that aligns with consensus rather than the ability to conduct in-depth analysis. In retrospect, encrypted Twitter is almost like a "low-IQ version of the Bloomberg Terminal": a single information stream that integrates salience, trust, and capital allocation.

Why did the era of "monoculture" become possible?

The existence of an era of “monoculture” is possible because it has a repeatable structure. Each cycle revolves around an object that is simple enough for a large group to understand, yet broad enough to capture most of the ecosystem’s attention and fluidity. I like to call these objects “toys.”

The term "toy" here is not used in a derogatory sense, but rather as a structural description. It can be understood as a game—easy to explain, easy to participate in, and inherently social (almost like an expansion pack for a massively multiplayer online role-playing game). A "toy" has a low barrier to entry and a high degree of narrative compression; you can explain what it is to a friend in just one sentence.

"Meta-narrative" refers to the manifestation when a "toy" becomes a shared game board. Meta refers to the dominant set of strategies and the dominant object around which most participants revolve. The power of a "single culture" lies in the fact that this meta-narrative is not merely "popular," but a shared game spanning users, developers, traders, and venture capitalists. Everyone is playing the same game, just at different levels of the stack.

@icobeast once wrote a brilliant article about the cyclical and ever-changing nature of "trendy things," which I highly recommend reading.

 https://x.com/icobeast/status/1993721136325005596

The market system we are experiencing requires an "inefficient window" that allows people to quickly amass "incredible wealth."

In the early stages of each cycle, the market is not entirely efficient because the infrastructure for large-scale participation in the meta-narrative is not yet fully established. While opportunities exist, the niche spaces within the market are not yet fully filled. This is crucial because widespread wealth accumulation requires a window of opportunity for a large number of participants to enter the market, rather than facing a completely hostile environment from the outset.

As George Akerlof said in *The Market for Lemons*:

"Information asymmetry between buyers and sellers can lead to market inefficiency."

The key is that, in order for this system to work, you need to provide a highly efficient market for one group of people, while for another group, this market is a typical "lemon market" (i.e., a market full of information asymmetry and inefficiency).

A monocultural system also requires a large-scale shared context, which encrypted Twitter (CT) provides. Shared contexts are very rare on the internet because attention is usually scattered. However, when a monocultural system forms, attention tends to be concentrated. This concentration can reduce coordination costs and amplify the effects of reflexivity.

As F.A. Hayek stated in *The Use of Knowledge in Society*:

"The information we must utilize is never in a centralized or integrated form, but merely incomplete and often contradictory fragments of knowledge scattered among all individuals."

In other words, the formation of a shared context enables market participants to coordinate their actions more efficiently, thereby promoting the prosperity and development of a single culture.

Why was the "monolithic narrative" once so credible? When fundamentals have a weaker binding force on the market, salience becomes a more important constraint than valuation. The market's primary question is not "How much is it worth?", but rather "What are we all focusing on? Is this trade already too crowded?"

A rough analogy is that popular culture used to be able to focus attention on a few shared objects (such as the same TV shows, chart-topping music, or celebrities). Now, attention is scattered across various niche areas and subcultures, and people no longer share the same set of references on a large scale. Similarly, encrypted Twitter (CT), as a mechanism, is undergoing a similar shift: the top-level shared context is decreasing, while more localized contexts are emerging in smaller circles.

Why is the era of "post-encrypted Twitter" dawning?

The emergence of "post-encrypted Twitter" is due to the gradual breakdown of the conditions that underpinned a "monoculture".

The first failure was that the "toy" was cracked much faster.

In previous cycles, the market has learned the rules of the game and industrialized them. When the rules are industrialized, inefficiency windows close faster and last shorter. As a result, the distribution of returns becomes more extreme: fewer winners and more structural losers.

Memecoins are a prime example of this dynamic. As an asset class, they are effective because of their low complexity and high reflexivity. However, it is precisely this characteristic that makes memecoins easy to mass-produce. Once the production line is mature, the meta-narrative becomes an assembly line.

As the market has evolved, the microstructure has changed. The median participant is no longer trading with other ordinary people, but rather battling against the system. When they enter the market, information has already been widely disseminated, liquidity pools have been pre-positioned, trading paths have been optimized, insiders have already laid out their plans, and even exit strategies have been calculated in advance. In this environment, the median participant's expected returns are compressed to extremely low levels.

In other words, in most cases, you simply become someone else's "exit liquidity".

A useful mental model is this: order flows in the early stages of a cycle are primarily driven by naive individual investors, while order flows in the later stages of a cycle become increasingly adversarial and mechanical. The same "toy" evolves into completely different games at different stages.

A single culture cannot last if it cannot produce enough significant winners to attract the next wave of new participants.

The second failure was that value extraction overshadowed value creation.

Here, "extraction" refers to the actors and mechanisms that capture liquidity value rather than create new liquidity.

In the early stages of a cycle, new participants can increase net liquidity and benefit from it, as the market environment expands faster than the value extraction layer is harvested. However, in the later stages of the cycle, new participants tend to become net contributors to the value extraction layer. Once this perception becomes widespread, market participation begins to decline. This decline in participation weakens the strength of the reflexive cycle.

This is why market sentiment shifts so consistently. If a market no longer offers broad and clear paths to victory, overall sentiment will gradually deteriorate. In a market where the median participant's experience is "I'm just someone else's liquidity," cynicism is often rational.

To understand the overall market sentiment among retail investors, you can refer to this post by @Chilearmy123.

The third failure lies in the dispersion of attention. When no single entity can capture the attention of the entire ecosystem, the market's "discovery layer" loses its clear salience. Participants begin to diversify into narrower areas. This dispersion is not only cultural but also has significant market consequences: liquidity is dispersed across different sub-sectors, price signals become less intuitive, and the dynamic of "everyone making the same trade" disappears.

In addition, there is another factor worth briefly mentioning: macroeconomic conditions affect the strength of reflexive cycles. The era of "monoculture" coincided with a period of strong global risk appetite and liquidity, making speculative reflexivity seem like the "norm." However, when capital costs rise and marginal buyers become more cautious, narrative-driven capital flows become more difficult to sustain in the long term.

What does "post-encrypted Twitter" mean?

"Post-Crypto Twitter" refers to a new market environment in which crypto Twitter is no longer the primary coordinating mechanism for capital allocation across the entire ecosystem, nor is it the core engine for on-chain markets to focus on a single meta narrative.

In the era of “monoculture,” crypto Twitter repeatedly and massively linked narrative consensus with centralized liquidity. In the post-crypto Twitter era, however, this connection has become weaker and more intermittent. Crypto Twitter remains relevant as a discovery platform and reputation metric, but it is no longer the reliable engine that synchronizes the entire ecosystem around “a deal,” “a toy,” or “a shared context.”

In other words, encrypted Twitter can still generate narratives, but only a small fraction of these narratives can be translated into "common knowledge" on a large scale, and even fewer of these "common knowledge" narratives can be further translated into a synchronized flow of orders. When this conversion mechanism fails, even though there is still a lot of activity in the market, the overall feeling is "quieter."

This is why subjective experiences have changed. Markets now appear slower and more specialized because widespread coordination has disappeared. The shift in sentiment is primarily a reaction to expected returns (EV) conditions. The market's "quiet" doesn't mean there's no activity, but rather a lack of narratives and synchronized actions that can resonate globally.

The Evolution of Encrypted Twitter: From Engine to Interface

Encrypted Twitter (CT) is not disappearing; its functionality has simply changed.

In the early market system, crypto Twitter was upstream in the flow of funds, and it determined the direction of the market to a certain extent. In the current market system, however, crypto Twitter is more like an "interface layer": it broadcasts reputation signals, emerges narratives, and helps route trust, but the actual decisions on capital allocation increasingly occur in "subgraphs" with higher levels of trust.

These subgraphs are not mysterious. They are dense networks with higher-quality information and frequent interactions among participants, such as small trading circles, domain-specific communities, private group chats, and inter-institutional discussion spaces. In this system, encrypted Twitter is more like a surface "front," while the real social and trading activities take place in the underlying social network layer.

This also explains a common misconception: "Crypto Twitter is declining" usually actually means "Crypto Twitter is no longer the primary place for ordinary participants to make money." Wealth is now accumulating more in places with higher quality information, restricted access, and more private trust mechanisms, rather than through public, noisy trust calculations.

Nevertheless, you can still generate substantial revenue by posting on encrypted Twitter and building a personal brand (some of my friends and nodes have done so and are still doing so). But the real value accumulation comes from building your social graph, becoming a trusted participant, and gaining more access to the "back-end layer."

In other words, brand building on the surface is still important, but the core competitiveness has shifted to the construction and participation in the "back-end trust network".

I don't know what will happen next.

I won't pretend I can accurately predict what the next "monoculture" will be. In fact, I'm skeptical that "monocultures" will re-emerge in the same way, at least under current market conditions. The key is that the mechanisms that once nurtured "monocultures" have degenerated.

My intuition may be somewhat subjective and situational, as it is based on the phenomena I am currently observing. However, the formation of these dynamics actually began to emerge earlier this year.

There are indeed some active areas right now, and it's not difficult to list the categories that are attracting attention. But I won't mention those areas because they don't really help the discussion. Overall, aside from pre-sales and some initial allocations, the trend we're seeing now is that the most overvalued categories tend to be "adjacent" to Crypto Twitter (CT), rather than being directly driven by Crypto Twitter itself.

argument

We have entered the "post-encrypted Twitter" (Post-CT) era.

This is not because encrypted Twitter is "dead," nor because discussions have lost their meaning, but because the structural conditions supporting the recurring systemic "monoculture" have been weakened. Games have become more efficient, value extraction mechanisms more sophisticated, attention more dispersed, and reflexive cycles have gradually shifted from systemic to localized.

The crypto industry continues, and crypto Twitter still exists. My view is narrower: the era when crypto Twitter could reliably orchestrate the entire market into a shared meta-narrative and generate widespread, low-barrier-to-entry non-linear returns is over, at least for now. Moreover, I believe the likelihood of this phenomenon recurring in the next few years is significantly reduced.

This doesn't mean you can't make money, nor does it mean the crypto industry is doomed. It's neither a pessimistic view nor a cynical conclusion. In fact, I've never been more optimistic about the future of this industry. My view is that future market distribution and salience mechanisms will be fundamentally different from those of the past few years.

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