When the lower-ranking soldiers laugh and say "crypto is dead," the higher-ranking soldiers are navigating through that damn cycle.

Original Author: Haotian (X: @tmel0211)

When the highest type of men hear the Tao, they diligently practice it. When the average type of men hear the Tao, they half-believe it. When the lowest type of men hear the Tao, they laugh heartily at it. — Tao Te Ching

This is a phrase that suddenly came to my mind recently amidst the noise filled with "Anything But Crypto," "Meme Nihilism," and "Crypto Doomsday."

This feeling became even stronger, especially after reading Vitalik Buterin's interview about 2026.

We see Vitalik Buterin sitting relaxed on a swing in Chiang Mai, not ecstatic about Ethereum's technical roadmap progress, but instead seeing a huge chasm between technology and application.

Why? Ethereum has made tremendous progress in scaling technology, with Gas Limit doubled, zkEVM successfully launched, and significant improvements in experiences like account abstraction. Technologically, we've won big, but at the application level, we've lost miserably.

In other words, we've built supercars capable of 300 km/h (L2/L3), but the roads are filled with "low-speed electric vehicles" (shitcoin Memes) and "bumper cars" (PVP mutual slaughter).

This intense sense of "misalignment" is incomprehensible to the vast majority. Building on Vitalik's reflections, I want to strip away the grand narratives and discuss these four harsh truths that only the "highest type of men" are paying attention to:

When "Infrastructure" Becomes an Addictive Dependency

We are trapped in a collective illusion: not only must we build roads, but we must build more roads, faster roads, even if there are no cars on them.

Originally, we envisioned "decentralized Uber" and "Web3 Amazon," but what arrived was endless financial speculation. This is a typical structural mismatch of "infrastructure overcapacity" and "extreme lack of PMF (Product-Market Fit)."

Why is this happening? The answer is simply that "selling shovels" is an easier story to tell than "mining for gold."

Over the past few years, VCs and developers have conspired to stage a carnival of "technological narcissism." As long as your TPS is high enough, as long as your ZK algorithm is obscure enough, you could secure a high valuation. As for whether anyone uses it? Not important, that's a problem for the next cycle.

In reality, true technology should be like air and water: you depend on it for survival, yet you don't feel its presence. The hype around infrastructure must shift towards applications and services. If we don't solve the problem of "who will drive the cars," building more roads is merely erecting tombstones for the industry's desolation.

The Essence of Social: Don't Let Dopamine Kill Oxytocin

Vitalik spoke a hard truth: If financial incentives are too strong, they directly destroy the essence of social interaction.

When we introduce Tokenomics into social products, we think we're incentivizing users, but in reality, we're feeding greed. The early growth metrics, is that social interaction? No, that's the carnival of "on-chain gold farming studios." Once the expected returns decline, the crowd disperses, leaving a mess behind.

This is why Vitalik affirmed the strategic wisdom of Farcaster's pivot to building a wallet.

In the era of AI Agents and high-frequency interaction, the wallet is the "universal connector" that links everything. When Farcaster decided to anchor social relationships at the wallet layer, rather than simply building a "Web3 version of Twitter," it wasn't an admission of defeat or a retreat. Instead, it pinpointed the lifeblood of Crypto products.

The endgame of social is not turning a "like" into a transaction, but turning "content" into an "asset." Only by stripping away excessive financial noise and returning to a curation and filtering logic similar to Substack can Web3 social rediscover its lost soul.

AI's Redemption: Issuing an "ID Card" to Silicon-Based Life

Grand narratives around AI + Crypto have been hyped wave after wave: AI Agent MEME token launches, x402 Agent payment extension trends, etc. But who can answer the core proposition Vitalik raised: What can Crypto actually bring to AI?

The answer is not the next 100x golden dog, but what Vitalik called "permissionlessness": Equal access rights for humans, companies, and AI Agents alike.

In the Web2 world, even the most powerful AI Agent is essentially an "unregistered resident." It has no bank card, no legal identity, can be disconnected by OpenAI at any moment, and can have its funds frozen due to risk control. It is merely a string of code on a server, the private property of tech giants.

But Crypto gives AI an on-chain identity that cannot be frozen. Regarding this, Vitalik also suggested several directions:

• AI's Bank Account: This is the EndGame for PayFi or x402 protocols. Because the high-frequency, transparent, and trustworthy micropayments between AI Agents can only be borne by blockchain.
• Prediction Markets: This is the venue for AI's superhuman cognition to be monetized. Prediction markets will be the best stage for AI to demonstrate "cognitive monetization."
• Data Provenance: When AI-generated content floods the world, only blockchain can prove "who is the original, who is the forgery."

Perhaps this is the real intersection of Crypto and AI: We are not launching tokens; we are building a legal and financial system that allows silicon-based life to breathe freely.

The End of Nihilism: Memes are the Revenge Bounce After the "Destruction of Technical Narratives"

Vitalik worries the industry will die from Meme nihilism. I worry too.

But we must understand the logic behind the prevalence of Memes: This is retail's "non-violent non-cooperation" against the greedy model of "VC syndication, high valuation with low float, infinite unlocks."

When so-called "value tokens" become tools for institutions to cash out at high prices, retail choosing Memes is a revenge bounce. The subtext is: since everyone is a scythe, I might as well go play in the casino with open rules, where it at least seems fair.

But this狂欢 is dangerous because it mortgages the industry's future. If Crypto ultimately consists of 100% gambling, it loses the foundational legitimacy for its existence and will eventually wither away from a lack of value-creation capability.

Aren't the biases we've recently felt from outsiders and even unfair treatment from algorithms all the price paid for the alienation of Crypto culture?

Only when technical narratives serve the real world, not a pure casino, can we break out of this "death loop."

That's all.

You might have noticed, I paired this article with an image reminiscent of "The Last of the Mohicans." In my eyes, if the Crypto doomsday script ever plays out, Vitalik Buterin would be the last cypherpunk守望ing in the depths of the jungle.

Returning to the beginning, I think it's necessary to explain that quote from the Tao Te Ching:

• The "lowest type of men" (Gamblers) are laughing at the application barrenness of the Crypto industry, seeing it as dead at a glance, and沉迷ing in the thrill of PVP mutual slaughter;
• The "average type of men" (industry practitioners) are煎熬ing in the industry with half-belief, devoid of idealism and speculative thrills. Idealism is worn away, speculative thrills are elusive, leaving only internal friction and迷茫;
• The few "highest type of men" like Vitalik see not the "Crypto endgame," but the eve of another "breakthrough" for the Crypto industry.

When the highest type of men hear the Tao, they diligently practice it. When the average type of men hear the Tao, they half-believe it. When the lowest type of men hear the Tao, they laugh heartily at it. Often, the more popular something is, the less Tao it contains. What the lowest type of men want is never the Tao, but热闹 (bustle, excitement).

So the question arises: if the Crypto doomsday script unfortunately arrives one day:

Would you be willing to follow Vitalik Buterin and join his cypherpunk army?

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