The encryption Twitter that is filled with the password to wealth has already passed.

Author: Lauris

Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow

Welcome to the era of “Post-Crypto Twitter”

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

“Post-Crypto Twitter” (Post-CT) does not mean the disappearance of discussions, but rather that Crypto Twitter, as a “mechanism for coordination through discourse,” is gradually losing its ability to repeatedly generate significant market events.

A single culture will not be able to continuously attract the next wave of new participants if it can no longer produce a sufficient number of significant winners.

The “significant market events” mentioned here do not refer to situations like “a certain token's price tripling,” but rather to instances where the attention of most liquidity market participants is focused on the same thing. In this framework, Crypto Twitter used to be a mechanism that transformed 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 is no longer functioning reliably.

I am not trying to predict what will happen next. To be frank, I don't have a clear answer either. The focus of this article is to explain why the previous models were effective, why they are declining, and what this means for how the crypto industry reorganizes itself.

Why did encrypted Twitter work in the past?

Crypto Twitter (CT) is important because it compresses three market functions into one interface.

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

In practice, crypto Twitter has created a focus of attention. It compresses a vast hypothesis space into a small subset of “actionable” objects at this moment. This compression addresses a coordination problem.

To put it more mechanically: Crypto Twitter transforms decentralized, private attention into visible, public common knowledge. If you see ten credible operators discussing the same object, you not only know of the object's existence, but you also know that others are aware of its existence, and you know that others know that you know of its existence. In a liquid market, this common knowledge is crucial.

As Herbert A. Simon said:

“The abundance of information leads to a scarcity of attention.”

The second function of encrypted Twitter is to act as a trust route. In the crypto market, most assets do not possess the characteristics 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 ongoing signals. “Trust route” is an informal infrastructure that determines whose claims can be believed early enough to create an impact.

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

It is worth noting that the trust mechanism of crypto Twitter does not solely depend on the “number of followers.” It is a comprehensive result of the number of followers, who follows you, the quality of replies, whether credible people interact with you, and whether your predictions withstand real-world validation. Crypto Twitter makes these signals easy to observe and at a very low cost.

Crypto Twitter has public trust, but over time, certain communities have gradually developed a tendency to place more emphasis on private trust.

The third feature of crypto Twitter is the transformation of narratives into capital allocation through reflexivity. Reflexivity is the key to this core loop: narratives drive prices, prices validate narratives, validation attracts more attention, attention brings more buyers, and this loop continuously reinforces itself until it collapses.

At this time, the microstructure of the market comes into play. The narrative does not abstractly drive the “market”, but rather drives the order flow. If a large group is persuaded by a certain narrative to believe that a certain object is “key”, then marginal participants will express this belief through purchasing.

When this cycle is strong enough, the market will temporarily favor behaviors that align with consensus over the ability for deep analysis. In retrospect, crypto Twitter is almost like a “low-IQ version of Bloomberg Terminal”: a single information stream that integrates significance, trust, and capital allocation.

Why has the era of “monoculture” become possible?

The reason the era of “single culture” can exist is because it has a repeatable structure. Each cycle revolves around an object that is simple enough for large groups to understand, yet broad enough to attract the attention and liquidity of most of the ecosystem. I like to call these objects “toys.”

The term “toy” here is not derogatory, but rather a structural description. It can be understood as a kind of game—easy to explain, easy to participate in, and essentially possessing social attributes (almost like an expansion pack for a large multiplayer online role-playing game). A “toy” has a low barrier to entry in terms of participation difficulty and a high degree of narrative compression; you can explain what it is to a friend in one sentence.

The “meta-narrative” (Meta) is the manifestation when “toys” become a shared game board. Meta refers to the dominant set of strategies and the dominant objects around which most participants gather. The power of a “single culture” lies in the fact that this meta-narrative is not only “popular” but is a shared game that spans users, developers, traders, and venture capital firms. Everyone is playing the same game, just at different levels of the stack.

@icobeast has written a wonderful article about the periodicity and changing nature of “trendy things,” which I highly recommend reading.

![]###https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-2c73bb2242673213015e5baeb495e080.webp(

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

The market system we are experiencing requires an “inefficiency window” that allows people to quickly earn “incredible wealth.”

In the early stages of each cycle, the market is not fully efficient, as the infrastructure for large-scale participation in the meta-narrative has not yet been fully established. While opportunities do exist at this time, the niche spaces in the market have not yet been completely filled. This is very important because the broad accumulation of wealth requires a window period that allows 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 the market away from efficiency.”

The key is that, in order for this system to operate, 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 filled with information asymmetry and inefficiency).

A single cultural system requires a large-scale shared context, and Crypto Twitter (CT) provides such a context. Shared contexts are rare on the internet, as attention is often dispersed. However, when a single culture forms, attention tends to converge. This convergence can reduce coordination costs and amplify the effects of reflexivity.

As Hayek (F. A. Hayek) stated in “The Use of Knowledge in Society”:

“The information about the situations we must leverage has never existed in a centralized or integrated form, but only as fragmented pieces of incomplete and often contradictory knowledge dispersed 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 “single narrative” once so credible? When the fundamental factors have weak constraints on the market, salience becomes a more important constraint than valuation. The primary question for the market is not “How much is it worth?” but rather “What are we all paying attention to? 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, music on the charts, or celebrities). Today, attention has been dispersed into various niche areas and subcultures, and people no longer share the same reference set on a large scale. Similarly, Crypto Twitter (CT) as a mechanism is also undergoing a similar transformation: the shared context at the top is decreasing, while more localized contexts are beginning to appear in smaller circles.

) Why is the era of “Post-Encrypted Twitter” coming?

The emergence of “Post-CT” is due to the gradual failure of the conditions that support a “single culture.”

The first failure lies in the fact that the “toys” were cracked more quickly.

In previous cycles, the market has learned the rules of the game and industrialized these rules. Once the rules of the game are industrialized, the inefficiency windows close faster and their duration becomes shorter. The result is that the distribution of profits becomes more extreme: there are fewer winners, while the number of structural losers increases.

Memecoins are a typical example of this dynamic. As an asset class, they are effective because they have low complexity while possessing high reflexivity. However, it is this characteristic that makes memecoins easy to mass-produce. Once the production line matures, the meta-narrative will turn into an assembly line.

With the development of the market, the microstructure has changed. The median participant is no longer trading with other ordinary people, but is instead competing against the system. By the time they enter the market, information has already been widely disseminated, liquidity pools have been “pre-buried,” trading paths have been optimized, insiders have completed their layouts, and even exit paths have been calculated in advance. In such an environment, the expected returns for the median participant are compressed to a very low level.

In other words, in most cases, you just become someone else's “Exit Liquidity.”

A useful mental model is that in the early stages of a cycle, order flow is primarily dominated by naive individual investors, while in the later stages of the cycle, order flow increasingly exhibits characteristics of confrontation and mechanization. The same “toy” evolves into completely different games at different stages.

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

The second failure lies in value extraction overwhelming value creation.

Here, “Extraction” refers to those 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 while benefiting from it, as the speed of market expansion outpaces the harvesting speed of the value extraction layer. However, in the later stages of the cycle, new participants often become net contributors to the value extraction layer. When this sentiment becomes widely recognized, market participation begins to decline. The decline in participation weakens the intensity of the reflexive cycle.

This is also why changes in market sentiment are so consistent. If a market no longer offers broad and clear paths to victory, overall sentiment tends to deteriorate gradually. In a market where the median participant's experience is “I am just the liquidity for others,” cynicism is often rational.

To understand the overall market sentiment of current retail participants, you can refer to @Chilearmy123's post.

![]###https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-bda76ac392145efcf3180437244ef7ba.webp(

The third failure lies in the dispersion of attention. When there is no single object capable of attracting the attention of the entire ecosystem, the market's “discovery layer” loses its clear prominence. Participants begin to differentiate into narrower fields. This dispersion is not only cultural but also brings significant market consequences: liquidity is dispersed across different segments, price signals become less intuitively visible, and the dynamic of “everyone doing the same trade” fades away.

In addition, there is another factor that needs to be briefly mentioned: macroeconomic conditions can affect the intensity of the reflexive cycle. The era of “single culture” coincided with a period of strong global risk appetite and liquidity environment, which made speculative reflexivity seem like a “norm.” However, when the cost of capital rises and marginal buyers become more cautious, narrative-driven capital flows become harder to sustain in the long term.

) What does “post-encrypted Twitter” mean?

“Post-Crypto Twitter” (Post-CT) refers to a new market environment where Crypto Twitter is no longer the primary coordinating mechanism for capital allocation across the entire ecosystem, nor is it the core engine around which on-chain markets concentrate around a single meta-narrative.

In the era of “single culture”, crypto Twitter repeatedly and extensively linked narrative consensus with liquidity concentration. In the era of “post-crypto Twitter”, this connection has weakened and become more intermittent. Crypto Twitter still serves as a discovery platform and a reputation indicator, but it is no longer the reliable engine driving the entire ecosystem around “a transaction”, “a toy”, and “a shared context”.

In other words, encrypted Twitter can still generate narratives, but only a few narratives can be transformed into “common knowledge” on a large scale, and even fewer “common knowledge” narratives can further translate into synchronous order flow. When this transformation mechanism fails, even though there are still many activities happening in the market, the overall feeling will seem “quieter.”

This is also why subjective experiences have changed. The market now appears slower and more specialized because broad coordination has disappeared. The emotional shift is primarily a response to changes in expected value (EV) conditions. The market's “quietness” does not mean there is no activity, but rather a lack of narratives and synchronized actions that can resonate across the board.

The Evolution of Encrypted Twitter: From Engine to Interface

Crypto Twitter (CT) will not disappear; rather, its functionality has transformed.

In the early market system, crypto Twitter was upstream of capital flow, to some extent determining the direction of the market. In the current market system, crypto Twitter is closer to an “interface layer”: it broadcasts reputation signals, surfaces narratives, and helps route trust, but actual capital allocation decisions are increasingly taking place in higher trust “subgraphs.”

These subgraphs are not mysterious. They are dense networks with higher information quality and frequent interactions among participants, such as small trading circles, communities in specific fields, private group chats, and discussion spaces among institutions. In this system, crypto Twitter is more like a superficial “facade”, while the real social and trading activities occur in the underlying social network layer.

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

Nevertheless, you can still achieve considerable gains by posting on crypto Twitter and building your personal brand (some of my friends and nodes have done this and are still doing it). However, real value accumulation comes from building your social graph, becoming a trusted participant, and gaining more access to opportunities in the “back layer.”

In other words, while surface-level brand building is still important, core competitiveness has shifted towards the construction and participation in a “back-end trust network.”

I don't know what will happen next.

I will not pretend that I can accurately predict what the next “monoculture” will be. In fact, I am somewhat skeptical about whether “monoculture” will form again in the same way, at least under the current market conditions. The key is that the mechanisms that once nurtured the “monoculture” have deteriorated.

My intuition may carry a certain degree of subjectivity and contextuality, as it is based on the phenomena I am currently observing. However, the formation of these dynamics has actually begun to manifest earlier this year.

There are indeed some active areas at the moment, and it is not difficult to list the categories that attract attention. However, I will not mention these areas as it does not provide any substantial help to the discussion. Overall, aside from presales and some initial allocations, the trend we are seeing now is that the most overvalued categories tend to be “adjacent” to crypto Twitter (CT), rather than being directly driven by it.

Argument

We have entered the Post-CT era.

This is not because crypto Twitter is “dead,” nor because discussions have lost their meaning, but because the structural conditions supporting the repeatedly occurring systemic “single culture” have been weakened. The game has become more efficient, the value extraction mechanisms more mature, attention more dispersed, and the reflexive cycle has gradually shifted from systemic to local.

The cryptocurrency industry continues, and crypto Twitter still exists. My viewpoint is narrower: the crypto Twitter that can reliably coordinate the entire market into a shared meta-narrative and create an era of broad, low-barrier nonlinear gains has at least come to an end for now. Furthermore, I believe the likelihood of this phenomenon reappearing in the next few years is significantly reduced.

This does not mean that you cannot make money, nor does it mean that the cryptocurrency industry has come to an end. This is neither a pessimistic view nor a cynical conclusion. In fact, I have never been as optimistic about the future of this industry as I am now. My point is that the future market distribution and significance mechanisms will be fundamentally different from those of the past few years.