Are there fewer and fewer young talents in the encryption industry?

Author: Leon Abboud

Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow

The cryptocurrency industry is handing over young talent to other fields, such as artificial intelligence (AI). This phenomenon is a heavy blow to the future of the industry.

When young talents begin to turn their attention to other industries in search of opportunities, this situation is reminiscent of the phenomenon where the youth of a country leave their hometowns in pursuit of better development prospects.

You have lost the minds that should have driven future development.

Economists refer to this phenomenon as “Brain Drain.”

I grew up in Lebanon, a country that suffers greatly from “brain drain.” Almost everyone I know who had the opportunity to study abroad left without hesitation. And the result? Not a single person has returned.

They all stayed abroad, where they started businesses, developed their careers, and started families.

All the talents that could have built the nation have been lost forever.

Such problems are currently unfolding in the cryptocurrency industry.

We are channeling talent into industries like artificial intelligence (AI). The reason is not that these industries offer higher salaries, but because they tell a more compelling story.

Recent graduates often seek a narrative rather than a salary. Young people are full of passion and energy, and they hope to build their careers in an industry that can shape the future.

And this was once the story of the crypto industry. In the last cycle, the crypto industry had a completely different narrative: privacy, self-sovereignty, anti-censorship, the future of finance…

These ideas attract a group of eager minds who wish to be part of this story.

But now, we are losing this narrative and the unique identity that makes this industry stand out.

At the same time, AI is providing young people with the stories they crave.

AI tells young people that they can redefine the ways humans think, work, create, and communicate. They can develop tools that change civilization…

The cryptocurrency industry, however, is drifting in a completely different direction. Its mission has become unclear.

This industry has gradually lost the feeling of “movement” and instead resembles the lobby of the Bellagio Casino in Las Vegas.

Nowadays, few people can tell a story that makes a 22-year-old feel the call of adventure.

We once had such a story, but later we became a casino, a huge online casino.

Casinos do not incentivize talent; they only attract tourists. It is important to note that casino-like behavior is not the root of the problem; it is merely a symptom.

We lost our own story and became a casino, rather than the other way around.

Young talents are flocking to AI, not because it is morally superior, but because it feels extraordinarily meaningful. It makes people feel that they are part of a larger cause, history is being written in real-time, and anyone can pick up a pen to write a part of it.

The crypto industry once gave people this feeling, but it is no longer the case.

However, the good news is that stories are not set in stone; they can be rewritten.

The revival of the crypto industry will not be written by institutions, ETFs, or billion-dollar foundations, but by real people like you and me who have truly shaped this field.

It is us young, dedicated, and imaginative minds.

If we want this industry to have a prosperous future, we need to make this field more attractive to young people. To achieve this, we must provide them with a story worth crossing the ocean for.

Here, I present a brand new story:

Crypto Twitter Lost Direction

Crypto Twitter has lost its sense of direction. The energy that once brought us together is dissipating, as the common narrative that supported us has vanished.

In the past, this was a community connected by the shared values of “early participants,” “rebels,” and “misunderstood individuals,” but now it has slipped into endless mediocrity.

Standards are declining as interests replace missions. Many people have started to attract attention by creating dramatic conflicts and spreading fake news, even labeling this behavior as “culture.”

Some people have turned their accounts into “traffic farms,” where content creators hire so-called “reply gangs” to create interactions, pretending that no one will notice. Everyone is “gaming the system” in the most obvious ways, and the worst part is that we all pretend this is normal.

The root of all this lies in the fact that Crypto Twitter, as a community, has lost the story that once held it together.

The window of opportunity is still open, but it won't be forever.

Identity Crisis of Encrypted Twitter

Anyone active on Crypto Twitter may have noticed that the culture in this industry is rapidly deteriorating. There are two main reasons behind this.

The first reason is the excessive incentive mechanism in the industry; but the deeper reason is that crypto Twitter has lost the story it once told itself.

Before this bull market, the core of crypto Twitter was a group of people who considered themselves “early adopters.” They viewed themselves as rebels, standing at the forefront of a misunderstood industry.

This group of people is able to see the potential of NFTs while the whole world considers them a scam. It is precisely because these people make up the core of Crypto Twitter that a unique culture has formed here — a culture of rebels, a culture of early builders, a culture that believes they are building the future of the internet.

But in this round of bull market, this rebellious industry culture has gradually disappeared.

When institutions start investing billions of dollars, participating in the crypto industry or working within it is no longer a symbol of rebellion.

When even the President of the United States starts issuing memecoins, and my uncle invests in them with ETFs, we have lost our identity as “rebels” and are no longer a “different” group.

For this reason, Crypto Twitter has also lost its identity.

Every community needs to reshape itself.

To survive, Crypto Twitter needs a new narrative; it needs to redefine itself. Just like Apple—back in the 1980s, Apple was a product for rebels, but as it gradually became mainstream, it had to reshape its image, no longer targeting just rebels, as it was no longer that niche brand.

Apple has repositioned itself as “the creative guardian against the status quo.” Even though it has become an industry giant, “Think Different” remains its new slogan.

Each community has undergone a transformation by replacing old myths and stories with new ones, which is the reality that crypto Twitter must face. We are no longer “early adopters” or “rebels”; we need a new narrative.

When you think about the impact of the cryptocurrency industry, whether it's the memecoins, Bitcoin, institutional investment, and the penetration of mainstream culture in this bull market, or the NFT, Bored Apes, and celebrity involvement in the previous bull market, one thing we can agree on is that the cryptocurrency industry knows how to create culture.

We stand at the forefront of the Internet, at the forefront of technology. We have witnessed many native founders and creators in the crypto space move into the mainstream, as well as the most mainstream celebrities launching their own projects through the crypto industry.

The cryptocurrency industry is a bridge to culture, and this is an undeniable fact. One narrative that we can agree on is: we are the manufacturing factory of culture.

We need a new “enemy” to fight.

No community can survive without a common enemy. For Crypto Twitter, our past “enemies” have been the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the government, and those institutions that try to ban us and take away our jobs and livelihoods.

However, today these “enemies” have been defeated and have even joined our ranks. We have lost external opponents, so we began to engage in infighting and turned to attack each other.

We need a new “enemy” to fight against. Although I cannot provide a clear answer at the moment, I believe that crypto Twitter can fight to save the internet—against the “Dead Internet Theory.” The internet is gradually declining, and soon the comment sections will become unusable, as the public internet will be flooded with bots.

Cryptography and NFTs are the only solutions to this problem. This is a “villain” I can imagine, and it is a goal that our entire industry can collectively fight against.

The only way for Crypto Twitter is to write a brand new story for ourselves—a story that we all believe in and that we steadfastly promote before others do. This story may seem crazy at first, but our task is to prove to the world that it is not.

So, I ask you again: what is our new story?

Before finding this answer, encrypted Twitter is destined to continue towards collapse.