The Renaissance of Crypto Assets: Reconstructing Value Consensus through On-Chain Content

The value consensus of digital Crypto Assets is built upon its unique culture. The dissemination of this value consensus cannot be separated from the cultural background of the Crypto Assets themselves. Value consensus is essentially a meme (Meme), and Crypto Assets cannot escape the influence of meme phenomena. Bitcoin is the earliest and largest representative of memes; it embedded a news report in the genesis block, directly incorporating the core cultural concept and ultimately achieving self-launch.

Returning to the tradition of Bitcoin's spontaneous self-raising and restoring on-chain culture and decentralization culture is a feasible approach. The emergence of inscriptions like Ordi and Sats directly injects inscription code information into the Bitcoin community, marking the spontaneous starting point of the Bitcoin Renaissance. The integration of encryption culture and technology, consciously achieving the combination of Crypto Assets and culture through content on-chain, is likely to become a direction for the development of inscription 2.0.

Value Consensus is a Meme

For newcomers to the Crypto Assets space, especially those transitioning from the blockchain field, it can often be confusing to see projects like EOS, which are technologically advanced and offer a good user experience, yet perform poorly in market capitalization. This is due to a lack of clear distinction between technological Consensus and value Consensus.

Consensus is divided into technical route consensus and value orientation consensus.

The value of Bitcoin is built from nothing to something, ultimately achieving value self-bootstrapping. In this process, the community not only needs to reach a technical Consensus but also a value Consensus. Merely achieving technical Consensus does not mean that a strong value Consensus can be established. Taking EOS as an example, its valuation has troubled many technicians: clearly the technical level is very high, so why does the price perform poorly? Even to this day, EOS's technology is still not considered outdated. However, all the technical advantages and ecological benefits cannot prevent the foundation from selling EOS in exchange for Bitcoin and Ethereum. This operation has reduced EOS to a tool for the team to harvest profits in the eyes of community members. When an asset forms a stereotype in the minds of investors, reversing the Consensus requires massive capital power. Lacking capital support, coupled with the departure of core members, no matter how good the product is, it cannot sustain EOS's valuation.

In contrast, the ancestor of meme coins—Dogecoin, had very few developers left even before Musk's endorsement. However, Musk's endorsement led most investors to believe that with Musk's social influence, Dogecoin would be seen, recognized, and loved by more people, ultimately leading to ownership. The diffusion of token consensus relies on Musk as the source of communication, which would be like adding wings to a tiger. This kind of community consensus pushed Dogecoin's price from $0.014 all the way up to $0.8.

These two cases illustrate that although EOS has good technology and products, it has not achieved an ideal price. In contrast, Dogecoin is purely a meme, lacking ecological and technical support, yet it has gained a high valuation. This shows that technological consensus does not equate to value consensus.

The process of forming a consensus on value orientation is the process of forming memes.

The technological consensus of Bitcoin ensures that each account can fully control its own permissions and that there is no double-spending problem. From the very beginning of Bitcoin's inception, the responsibility of promoting the technological consensus has been carried out by its technical white paper. Bitcoin has gone from being worthless to valuable, from having miners to truly realizing payments, a process that took a year and a half. During this time, members of the Bitcoin community have continually reflected not only on whether Bitcoin, as a blockchain, is secure enough, but more importantly, whether Bitcoin has value and what that value is. This is the value consensus, which is always subjective. The foundation of Bitcoin's value consensus is laid by "The Non-State Theory of Money" and the fear, uncertainty, and doubt about centralized currency (FUD). The news that was written into the Genesis block is the seed and the fuse of FUD. Without the reprint of this Genesis block, this news would have long been buried in the vast archives of The Times.

Satoshi Nakamoto deeply understands the importance of attention. Looking back at the successful launch of Bitcoin, Satoshi has been consulting with the big shots in the crypto community. For instance, he showed David that Bitcoin had realized the B-cash concept proposed by David and received David's off-chain support. This endorsement directly established a brand for Bitcoin within the community, subsequently gaining the community's attention. On January 12, 2009, Hal Finney ( received 10 bitcoins sent by Satoshi during a Bitcoin transaction test, becoming the first recipient of a Bitcoin transfer. After that, Satoshi often transferred the mined bitcoins to friends in the crypto community, gaining the attention of community members through this behavior. This behavior later evolved into a unique way for crypto projects to establish attention: airdrops!

Looking back to the first real transaction of Bitcoin, Laszlo Hanyecz ) purchased two pizzas for 10,000 coins. In this exchange, Bitcoin had a price for the first time. Both parties understood the Bitcoin. The premise for both parties to reach a Consensus on the purchasing power of Bitcoin was their recognition of the value narrative of Bitcoin. The recognition of the value narrative was based on the ability to notice the value narrative of Bitcoin. Satoshi Nakamoto engraved a deeply meaningful news headline in the genesis block, which automatically spread the value narrative of Bitcoin whenever any Bitcoin evangelist explained the history of Bitcoin. This is the most direct and efficient way to capture value.

( coin price fluctuations cannot escape the meme phenomenon

Most Crypto Assets are essentially meme coins. Looking back at other tokens in the Crypto Assets space, many mainstream tokens like UNI, ARB, OP) lack clear value capture support. The rights and obligations of more assets are difficult to define, and it is even hard to find effective value capture. The valuation of Crypto Assets cannot be fully explained by monetary theory or financial asset theory. Bitcoin claims to be a peer-to-peer cash payment system, but how many people actually use Bitcoin for payments today? We can boldly say that Bitcoin is the biggest meme. The price fluctuations of coins essentially reflect the meme effect. It is precisely because of the meme attribute that Crypto Assets possess a quality different from traditional finance—attention, and their volatility cycle is also markedly different from traditional finance.

Even the value of utility tokens contains meme components. The pricing of financial assets ultimately depends on supply and demand. Supply and demand arise from changes in human decisions, which are influenced by emotions, and emotions are affected by information. Behavioral finance has long become a consensus in the investment community. The traditional financial value represented by tokens and memes are not mutually exclusive. Memes can enhance the valuation of utility tokens but may also weaken the value of utility tokens.

Therefore, we can say that the fluctuations in coin prices are essentially a manifestation of the meme effect.

In the short term, the coin price may be manipulated by certain patterns, but in the long run, the community size holding the tokens and the willingness to hold coins depend on whether the output of values is successful. Just like with Apple phones, even if the cost-performance ratio is not high, users still buy them. Only long-term believers and holders are the true support for the value of the tokens. And these believers and holders are attracted by culture.

Consensus requires cultural dissemination

The technical consensus and value consensus of tokens are formed through different paths. Technical consensus helps in forming the value consensus of tokens. Both technical consensus and value consensus have an emotional component, and there is a tendency for people to rely on intuitive thinking. Therefore, unlike copying cold code between different computers, the spread of consensus among people requires warm content as a carrier. This warm content that spreads among people is what we typically define as social content.

All crypto project teams have no disagreement in building brand and establishing value consensus through social media and social content. Almost all the project teams I know have various social accounts and private communication spaces. From community operations to group administrators, project teams will form their own community hierarchy. Social accounts become the source of communication, and communities or a series of crypto circles become the channels of dissemination.

The technical white paper of Bitcoin is calm and objective, but the news engraved in the genesis block is full of warmth. This news reflects the value orientation that Satoshi Nakamoto wants to promote to Bitcoin followers. The genesis block has been deployed around the world with full nodes, and as long as Bitcoin exists, this excerpt advocating Bitcoin's value orientation will not cease its dissemination. Every time people read this excerpt, they are reminded of the impending doom of centralized central banks. If we regard Bitcoin as a religion, then "UK Chancellor's bailout" is the apocalypse prophecy of that religion. And Bitcoin is Maitreya, the Messiah, the Ark of Noah in the end times.

The cryptocurrency circle has always been the most knowledgeable about cultural dissemination. Not looking at the past, just looking at the current wave of inscriptions, various small images and slogans are all aimed at letting more people understand the meme culture represented by four letters. Unfortunately, the area of dissemination still mainly relies on Web2 social media, and memes themselves do not carry a strong value orientation like Bitcoin. Many inscriptions cannot find their own positioning during dissemination. Successful inscriptions, on one hand, occupy the orthodox position of inscriptions, and on the other hand, form a unique culture in narrative, such as the "1 sats = 1 sats" of the Sats community.

In summary, cultural content is a carrier of value orientation. This understanding coincides with meme theory. A meme is an information unit in cultural transmission. Here, culture broadly refers to thoughts, concepts, customs, artistic forms, etc. To support token prices, designers need to consider the relationship between culture and coin value during the cultural transmission process. The meme contained in Bitcoin set a good precedent for the crypto community, but unfortunately, many so-called "meme" tokens that followed often only pursue the transmission cost of "meme" and abandon the relationship between "meme" and token value. This is also why, after Bitcoin, there are only meme coin names, but no longer any meme narratives.

Content On-Chain: Capturing Native Attention on the Chain

Content on-chain capturing native on-chain attention is currently a very rare content on-chain strategy. Other tracks have not formed a sustained economic cycle and are mostly in the experimental stage.

Widely achieving a consensus on value orientation requires capturing attention.

To reach a consensus on value, we first need information to reach us. In modern society, the cost of content creation is almost zero. Compared to the flood of incoming content, attention has become a scarce resource since a hundred years ago. From the positioning of mainstream media to the slots of KOLs, from Web2 to Web3, project operations cannot ignore the importance of attention. Since the emergence of the first generation of print media, attention has become the main trading commodity of media. Entering the Web2 era, platforms that control the flow of traffic regard traffic distribution as the source of monopolistic profits.

In the traditional business world, advertising for products is aimed at helping consumers understand the products themselves, as well as promoting their attributes and value propositions. However, the most high-end advertising often adopts a method of value output. Multinational giants like Apple and Huawei, as long as they offer brand differentiated products, are often very adept at this. This kind of value output is essentially no different from the value output of digital encryption assets.

In traditional fields, the methods used by the Crypto Assets industry to capture attention are quite similar. There are event marketing strategies like selling an NFT at Sotheby's for tens of millions of dollars, hosting parties on chartered cruise ships, and brand marketing by securing naming rights for sports arenas.

There are also on-chain information channels in the crypto asset circle. For example, the inscriptions of Bitcoin, which are only four characters long, directly inject meme information into the core of the Bitcoin community. Whether in agreement or opposition to the inscriptions, their emergence requires members of the Bitcoin community to express their stance. This on-chain information is eternal and open. Inscriptions that comply with the rules can be etched onto the Bitcoin blockchain and read by others. The process of minting inscriptions is equivalent to a certain address liking that piece of information, which is a public expression of attitude. However, traditional