Opinion: In the post-crypto Twitter era, nonlinear returns have come to an end

Author | Lauris

Translation | Deep潮 TechFlow

This article does not represent Wu Shuo’s views and does not constitute any investment or financial advice. Readers should strictly comply with local laws and regulations.

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Welcome to the era of “Post-Crypto Twitter.”

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

“Post-CT” does not mean discussions disappear, but rather that crypto Twitter, as a “coordination mechanism through discourse,” is gradually losing its ability to repeatedly generate major market events.

A single culture cannot sustain itself if it no longer produces enough significant winners to attract the next wave of new participants.

The “major market events” mentioned here are not about “a token’s price tripling,” but about most liquidity market participants focusing their attention on the same thing. In this framework, crypto Twitter used to be a mechanism that transformed public narratives into coordinated flows around a dominant meta-narrative. The significance of the “Post-CT” era is that this transformation mechanism no longer functions reliably.

I am 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 before?

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

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

In practice, crypto Twitter creates focal points. It compresses a vast hypothesis space into a small set of “actionable at this moment” objects. This compression solves a coordination problem.

More mechanically: crypto Twitter transforms dispersed, private attention into visible, public common knowledge. If you see ten credible traders discussing the same object, you not only know it exists but also know that others know it exists, and that they know you know. In liquidity markets, this common knowledge is crucial.

As Herbert A. Simon said: “The abundance of information leads to a scarcity of attention.”

The second function of crypto Twitter is to serve 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 influence the market.

This is not a mysterious phenomenon but results from thousands of participants continuously calculating rough reputation functions in public. People infer who are early entrants, who have good pre-judgments, who have resource channels, and whose behavior correlates with positive EV. This reputation layer makes capital allocation possible without formal due diligence, acting as a simplified tool for choosing trading counterparts.

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

Crypto Twitter embodies public trust, but over time, some communities also develop a tendency toward more private trust.

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

At this point, the market’s microstructure comes into play. Narratives do not abstractly drive the “market,” but rather the order flow. If a large group is convinced by a narrative that a certain object is “key,” marginal participants will express this belief through purchases.

When this cycle is strong enough, the market temporarily tends to reward behaviors aligned with consensus rather than deep analysis. Looking back, crypto Twitter is almost like a “low-IQ Bloomberg terminal”: a single stream of information that integrates salience, trust, and capital distribution.

Why did a “single culture” era become possible?

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

“Toy” here is not pejorative but a structural description. It can be understood as a game—easy to explain, easy to participate in, and inherently social (almost like an expansion pack for a large multiplayer online role-playing game). A “toy” has low participation barriers and high narrative compression—you can explain it to friends in one sentence.

“Meta” is the manifestation when “toys” become shared game boards. Meta refers to the dominant strategy set and the main object around which most participants revolve. The power of the “single culture” lies in the fact that this meta is not just “popular,” but a shared game across users, developers, traders, and VCs. Everyone is playing the same game, just at different levels of the stack.

@icobeast wrote an excellent article on the cyclical and changing nature of “trend things,” which I highly recommend.

The market system we experience requires a “non-efficiency window” that allows people to quickly earn “incredible wealth.”

In early stages of each cycle, the market is not fully efficient because the infrastructure for large-scale participation in the meta narrative is not yet fully built. Opportunities exist but do not yet fill the niche space of the market. This is crucial because broad wealth accumulation needs a window for many participants to enter, 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 can lead to market inefficiency.”

The key is that, for this system to work, you need to provide highly efficient markets for some, while for others, it remains a typical “lemon market” with information asymmetry and inefficiency.

A single culture system also requires a large-scale shared context, which crypto Twitter (CT) provides. Shared context is rare on the internet because attention is usually dispersed. However, when a single culture forms, attention tends to concentrate. This concentration reduces coordination costs and amplifies reflexivity.

As F. A. Hayek said in “The Use of Knowledge in Society”: “The information needed to utilize those circumstances is never in one place in a concentrated or integrated form but is scattered among all individuals in incomplete and often contradictory fragments of knowledge.”

In other words, the formation of shared context enables market participants to coordinate more efficiently, fostering the prosperity and development of a single culture.

Why was the “meta-narrative” so credible in the past? When fundamental constraints on the market were weak, salience (Salience) became a more important constraint than valuation. The primary question was not “How much is it worth?” but “What are we all paying attention to? Is this trade too crowded?”

A rough analogy is that mass culture used to focus attention on a few shared objects (like the same TV shows, top charts, or celebrities). Today, attention is dispersed across niche fields and subcultures, and people no longer share the same reference set at scale. Similarly, crypto Twitter (CT) as a mechanism is also undergoing a similar shift: the top-level shared context diminishes, and more localized contexts emerge in smaller circles.

Why is the “Post-Crypto Twitter” era arriving?

The reason for “Post-CT” is that the conditions supporting the “single culture” are gradually failing.

The first failure is that “toys” are cracked faster.

In previous cycles, the market learned the game rules and industrialized them. Once the rules are industrialized, the non-efficiency window closes faster, and the duration shortens. As a result, the distribution of gains becomes more extreme: fewer winners, more structural losers.

Memecoins are a typical example of this dynamic. As an asset class, they are effective because of their low complexity and high reflexivity. But this trait also makes memecoins easy to mass-produce. Once the production line matures, meta-narratives become assembly lines.

As the market develops, microstructure changes. The median participant no longer trades with ordinary traders but against the system. They enter markets with widely disseminated information, pre-embedded liquidity pools, optimized trading paths, insiders who have already positioned, and even pre-calculated exit routes. In such an environment, the expected returns for median participants are compressed to very low levels.

In other words, most of the time, you are just “exit liquidity” for others.

A useful mental model: early-cycle order flow is dominated by naive retail investors, while late-cycle order flow becomes increasingly adversarial and mechanical. The same “toy” evolves into a completely different game at different stages.

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

The second failure is that value extraction outweighs value creation.

“Extraction” here refers to actors and mechanisms that capture liquidity value rather than create new liquidity.

In early cycles, new participants can increase net liquidity and benefit because the market expansion outpaces the harvesting of value by the extraction layer. But in later stages, new entrants tend to become net contributors to the extraction layer. When this perception becomes widespread, market participation declines. Reduced participation weakens the reflexivity cycle.

This explains why market sentiment shifts so consistently. If a market no longer offers broad, clear paths to victory, overall sentiment deteriorates. In a market where the median participant’s experience is “I am just someone else’s exit liquidity,” cynicism is often rational.

To gauge the overall market sentiment of retail participants, see @Chilearmy123’s post.

The third failure is attention dispersion. When no single object can attract the entire ecosystem’s attention, the “discovery layer” of the market loses clear salience. Participants fragment into narrower fields. This dispersion is not only cultural but also has significant market consequences: liquidity disperses into different segments, price signals become less transparent, and the “everyone is doing the same trade” dynamic disappears.

Additionally, a factor worth briefly mentioning: macroeconomic conditions influence

the strength of reflexivity cycles. The “Post-CT” era coincides with periods of strong global risk appetite and liquidity, making speculative reflexivity seem like a “normal” state. But as capital costs rise and marginal buyers become more cautious, narrative-driven capital flows become harder to sustain long-term.

What does “Post-Crypto Twitter” mean?

“Post-CT” refers to a new market environment where crypto Twitter is no longer the primary coordination mechanism for capital distribution across the entire ecosystem, nor the core engine of on-chain markets centered around a single meta-narrative.

In the “single culture” era, crypto Twitter repeatedly and massively linked narrative consensus with liquidity concentration. In the “Post-CT” era, this link weakens and becomes intermittent. Crypto Twitter still functions 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 widely transformed into “common knowledge,” and even fewer “common knowledge” narratives can further translate into synchronized order flow. When this transformation mechanism fails, even if many activities still occur in the market, the overall feeling will seem “quieter.”

This explains why subjective experience has changed. The market now feels slower and more professional because broad coordination has disappeared. The emotional shift mainly reflects reactions to EV (expected value) conditions. The market’s “quietness” does not mean no activity, but rather a lack of narratives and synchronized actions capable of triggering global resonance.

Evolution of crypto Twitter: from engine to interface

Crypto Twitter (CT) will not disappear but will change function.

In early market systems, crypto Twitter was upstream of capital flow, influencing the market direction to some extent. In the current system, crypto Twitter is more like an “interface layer”: it broadcasts reputation signals, surfaces narratives, and helps with trust routing, but actual capital allocation decisions increasingly happen within higher-trust “subgraphs.”

These subgraphs are not mysterious. They are dense networks with higher information quality and frequent interactions, such as small trader circles, niche communities, private chats, and institutional discussion spaces. In this system, crypto Twitter is more like a superficial “front,” while real social and trading activities happen behind the scenes in the social network layer.

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

Nevertheless, you can still earn substantial returns by posting on crypto Twitter and building your personal brand (some of my friends and nodes are already doing this and continue to do so). But true value accumulation comes from building your social graph, becoming a trusted participant, and gaining more access to “backstage” layers.

In other words, surface-level branding remains important, but core competitiveness has shifted toward building and participating in “backstage trust networks.”

I don’t know what will happen next

I won’t pretend to accurately predict what the next “monoculture” will be. In fact, I am skeptical that a “single culture” will form again in the same way, at least under current market conditions. The mechanisms that once fostered “single culture” have already degraded.

My intuition may be somewhat subjective and contextual, based on what I observe now. However, these dynamics started to manifest earlier this year.

There are indeed some active areas now; listing categories that attract attention is not difficult. But I won’t mention these areas because it doesn’t help the discussion substantively. Overall, aside from pre-sales and some initial distributions, the current trend is that the most overhyped categories tend to be those “adjacent” to crypto Twitter (CT), rather than directly driven by it.

Arguments

We have entered the “Post-CT” era.

This is not because crypto Twitter “died,” nor because discussions have lost meaning, but because the structural conditions supporting the recurring systemic “single culture” have weakened. The game has become more efficient, value extraction mechanisms more mature, attention more dispersed, and reflexivity cycles are gradually shifting from systemic to local.

The crypto industry still 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 generate broad, low-threshold nonlinear returns has at least ended for now. Moreover, I believe the likelihood of this phenomenon re-emerging in the next few years is significantly reduced.

This does not mean you cannot make money, nor does it mean the crypto industry is ending. This is neither a pessimistic view nor a cynical conclusion. In fact, I am more optimistic about the future of this industry than ever before. My point is that the distribution of markets and the salience mechanisms in the future will be fundamentally different from the past few years.