Author: Lauris
Translation: TechFlow
Welcome to the "Post-Crypto Twitter" era
The "Crypto Twitter" (CT) referred to here is Crypto Twitter as a market discovery and capital allocation engine, not the general crypto community on Twitter.
"Post-Crypto Twitter" does not mean the disappearance of discussion, but rather that Crypto Twitter, as a "mechanism for coordination through discourse," is gradually losing its ability to repeatedly generate significant market events.
If a single culture can no longer produce enough notable winners, it cannot continue to attract the next wave of new participants.
The "significant market events" mentioned here do not refer to situations like "a token price tripling," but rather to the attention of most liquidity market participants being focused on the same thing. Within this framework, Crypto Twitter was once a mechanism that transformed public narratives into coordinated flows around a dominant meta-narrative. The significance of the "Post-Crypto Twitter" era is that this transformation mechanism is no longer reliably effective.
I'm not trying to predict what will happen next. Frankly, I don't have a clear answer either. The focus of this article is to explain why the previous model worked, why it is declining, and what this means for how the crypto industry reorganizes itself.
Why did Crypto Twitter work in the past?
Crypto Twitter (CT) was important because it compressed three market functions into a single interface.
The first function of Crypto Twitter is narrative discovery. CT is a high-bandwidth salience mechanism. "Salience" is not just an academic way of saying "interesting," but a market term referring to how the map converges on what is currently worth paying attention to.
In practice, Crypto Twitter created focal points of attention. It compressed a huge hypothesis space into a small set of "actionable right now" objects. This compression solved a coordination problem.
Put more mechanically: Crypto Twitter turned dispersed, private attention into visible, public common knowledge. If you see ten credible operators all discussing the same object, you not only know of its existence, but you know others know, and you know others know you know. In liquidity markets, this common knowledge is crucial.
As Herbert A. Simon said:
"A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."
The second function of Crypto Twitter is acting as a trust router. In crypto markets, most assets do not have strong intrinsic value anchors in the short term. Therefore, capital cannot be allocated solely based on fundamentals, but flows through people, reputation, and ongoing signals. "Trust routing" 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 rough reputation function continuously calculated in public by thousands of participants. People infer who are early entrants, who have good prior judgment, who have resource channels, and whose behavior is associated with positive EV (expected value). This reputation layer enables capital allocation without formal due diligence, as it serves as a simplified tool for counterparty selection.
It is worth noting that the trust mechanism of Crypto Twitter does not depend solely on "follower count." It is a combination of follower count, who follows you, the quality of replies, whether credible people interact with you, and whether your predictions withstand reality. Crypto Twitter makes these signals easy to observe at very low cost.
Crypto Twitter features both public trust and, over time, some communities have gradually developed a tendency toward more private trust.
The third function of Crypto Twitter is to convert narrative into capital allocation through reflexivity. Reflexivity is the key to this core loop: narrative drives price, price validates narrative, validation attracts more attention, attention brings more buyers, and this cycle self-reinforces until it collapses.
At this point, the market's microstructure comes into play. Narratives do not abstractly drive "the market," but drive order flow. If a large group is convinced by a narrative and believes an object is "key," marginal participants express this belief by buying.
When this loop is strong enough, the market temporarily tends to reward consensus-following behavior over deep analytical ability. In retrospect, Crypto Twitter was almost like a "low-IQ version of the Bloomberg Terminal": a single information stream integrating salience, trust, and capital allocation.
Why was the "single culture" era possible?
The "single culture" era existed because it had a repeatable structure. Each cycle revolved around an object simple enough for mass understanding, yet broad enough to attract most of the ecosystem's attention and liquidity. I like to call these objects "toys."
"Toys" here is not pejorative, but a structural description. You can think of it as a game—easy to explain, easy to participate in, and inherently social (almost like an expansion pack for a massive multiplayer online role-playing game). A "toy" has a low participation threshold and high narrative compressibility; you can explain it to a friend in a single sentence.
The "meta-narrative" (Meta) is the manifestation when the "toy" becomes a shared game board. Meta refers to the dominant set of strategies and the main object around which most participants cluster. The power of a single culture is that this meta-narrative is not just "popular," but a shared game spanning users, developers, traders, and VCs. Everyone is playing the same game, just at different layers of the stack.
@icobeast once wrote an excellent article on the cyclical and changing nature of "trendy things," which I highly recommend reading.
The market system we have experienced requires an "inefficiency window" that allows people to quickly make "incredible wealth."
In the early stages of each cycle, the market is not fully efficient because the infrastructure for mass participation in the meta-narrative (Meta) is not yet fully built. Opportunities exist, but the market's niche space is not yet fully filled. This is important because broad wealth accumulation requires a window for many participants to enter the market, rather than facing a fully hostile environment from the start.
As George Akerlof said in "The Market for Lemons":
"Information asymmetry between buyers and sellers leads the market away from efficiency."
The key is that for this system to work, you need a highly efficient market for some people, while for others, it is a classic "lemon market" (full of information asymmetry and inefficiency).
The single culture system also requires a large-scale shared context, which is exactly what Crypto Twitter (CT) provided. Shared context is rare on the internet because attention is usually scattered. However, when a single culture forms, attention becomes concentrated. This concentration reduces coordination costs and amplifies the effect of reflexivity.
As F. A. Hayek said in "The Use of Knowledge in Society":
"The knowledge of the circumstances which we must use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess."
In other words, the formation of shared context enables market participants to coordinate actions more efficiently, thus promoting the prosperity and development of a single culture.
Why was the "single meta-narrative" so credible in the past? When fundamentals have weak constraints on the market, salience becomes a more important constraint than valuation. The market's primary question is not "What is it worth?" but "What are we all paying attention to? Is this trade already too crowded?"
A rough analogy is that mass culture used 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 niches and subcultures, and people no longer share the same reference set at scale. Similarly, Crypto Twitter (CT) as a mechanism is undergoing a similar transformation: top-level shared context is decreasing, while more localized contexts are emerging in smaller circles.
Why is the "Post-Crypto Twitter" era arriving?
The reason for the emergence of "Post-Crypto Twitter" is that the conditions supporting the "single culture" are gradually failing.
The first failure is that "toys" are being cracked faster.
In previous cycles, the market learned the rules of the game and industrialized them. Once the rules are industrialized, the inefficiency window closes faster and lasts for a shorter time. As a result, the distribution of returns becomes more extreme: fewer winners and more structural losers.
Memecoins are a typical example of this dynamic. As an asset class, they are effective because of their low complexity and extremely high reflexivity. However, this very feature makes memecoins easy to mass-produce. Once the production line matures, the meta-narrative becomes an assembly line.
As the market evolves, the microstructure changes. The median participant is no longer trading with other ordinary people, but against the system. By the time they enter the market, information has been widely disseminated, liquidity pools have been "pre-seeded," trading paths have been optimized, insiders have already positioned themselves, and even exit paths have been pre-calculated. In such an environment, the expected return for the median participant is compressed to a very low level.
In other words, most of the time, you simply become someone else's "exit liquidity."
A useful mental model is: early-cycle order flow is dominated by naive retail investors, while late-cycle order flow becomes increasingly adversarial and mechanized. The same "toy" evolves into a completely different game at different stages.
A single culture cannot be sustained if it cannot produce enough notable winners to attract the next wave of new participants.
The second failure is that value extraction has overwhelmed value creation.
"Extraction" here refers to actors and mechanisms that capture liquidity value rather than create new liquidity.
In the early stages of the cycle, new participants can add net liquidity and benefit from it, as the market's expansion outpaces the harvesting speed of the value extraction layer. However, in the later stages, new participants often become net contributors to the value extraction layer. When this perception becomes widespread, market participation begins to decline. The decline in participation weakens the strength of the reflexivity loop.
This is also why market sentiment changes so uniformly. If a market no longer provides broad, clear paths to victory, overall sentiment gradually deteriorates. 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 of current retail participants, refer to this post by @Chilearmy123.
The third failure is the dispersion of attention. When no single object can attract the attention of the entire ecosystem, the market's "discovery layer" loses clear salience. Participants begin to diverge into narrower fields. This dispersion is not only cultural but also has significant market consequences: liquidity is spread across different segments, price signals become less intuitive, and the dynamic of "everyone making the same trade" disappears.
Additionally, there is a factor that needs brief mention: macroeconomic conditions affect the strength of the reflexivity loop. The "single culture" era coincided with a period of strong global risk appetite and liquidity, making speculative reflexivity seem "normal." But when capital costs rise and marginal buyers become more cautious, narrative-driven capital flows are harder to sustain over the long term.
What does "Post-Crypto Twitter" mean?
"Post-Crypto Twitter" refers to a new market environment in which Crypto Twitter is no longer the main coordination mechanism for capital allocation across the ecosystem, nor the core engine for on-chain markets to concentrate around a single meta-narrative (Meta).
In the "single culture" era, Crypto Twitter repeatedly and massively linked narrative consensus with liquidity concentration. In the "Post-Crypto Twitter" era, this link is weaker and more intermittent. Crypto Twitter still serves as a discovery platform and reputation indicator, but it is no longer the reliable engine that synchronizes the entire ecosystem around "one trade," "one toy," or "one shared context."
In other words, Crypto Twitter can still generate narratives, but only a few narratives can be converted into "common knowledge" at scale, and even fewer "common knowledge" narratives can further be converted into synchronized order flow. When this transformation mechanism fails, even if there is still a lot of activity in the market, the overall feeling is "quieter."
This is also why the subjective experience has changed. The market now feels slower and more specialized because broad coordination has disappeared. The emotional shift is mainly a response to 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 trigger global resonance.
The evolution of Crypto Twitter: from engine to interface
Crypto Twitter (CT) will not disappear, but its function has changed.
In early market systems, Crypto Twitter was upstream of capital flows and to some extent determined the market's direction. In the current market system, Crypto Twitter is more like an "interface layer": it broadcasts reputation signals, surfaces narratives, and helps route trust, but actual capital allocation decisions increasingly occur in higher-trust "subgraphs."
These subgraphs are not mysterious. They are dense networks with higher information quality and frequent interaction among participants, such as small operator circles, domain-specific communities, private group chats, and inter-institutional discussion spaces. In this system, Crypto Twitter is more like a surface "front," while real social and trading activity happens 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 main place for ordinary participants to make money." Wealth now accumulates more in places with higher information quality, restricted access, and more private trust mechanisms, rather than through public, noisy trust computation.
Nevertheless, you can still achieve considerable returns by posting on Crypto Twitter and building a personal brand (some of my friends and nodes have done and are still doing this). But real value accumulation comes from building your social graph, becoming a trusted participant, and gaining more access to the "backstage layer."
In other words, surface-level brand building is still important, but core competitiveness has shifted to building and participating in the "backstage trust network."
I don't know what will happen next
I won't pretend to be able to accurately predict what the next "monoculture" will be. In fact, I am skeptical that a "single culture" will form in the same way again, at least under current market conditions. The key is that the mechanisms that once fostered a "single culture" have degraded.
My intuition may be somewhat subjective and contextual, as it is based on what I am currently observing. However, these dynamics actually began to emerge earlier this year.
There are indeed some active areas at present, and listing the categories that attract attention is not difficult. But I will not mention these areas, as it does not substantively help the discussion. Overall, apart from presales and some initial allocations, the trend we now see is: the most overvalued categories are often those "adjacent" to Crypto Twitter (CT), rather than directly driven by CT itself.
Argument
We have entered the "Post-Crypto Twitter" (Post-CT) era.
This is not because Crypto Twitter is "dead," nor because discussion has lost its meaning, but because the structural conditions supporting the repeated emergence of systemic "single cultures" have been weakened. The game has become more efficient, value extraction mechanisms more mature, attention more dispersed, and the reflexivity loop has shifted from systemic to local.
The crypto industry continues, and Crypto Twitter still exists. My view is narrower: the era when Crypto Twitter could reliably coordinate the entire market into a shared meta-narrative and create broad, low-threshold, nonlinear returns has, at least for now, ended. Moreover, I believe the likelihood of this phenomenon recurring in the next few years has significantly decreased.
This does not mean you can't make money, nor does it mean the crypto industry is over. This is neither a pessimistic view nor a cynical conclusion. In fact, I have never been more optimistic about the future of this industry. My point is that the future market distribution and salience mechanisms will be fundamentally different from those of the past few years.
