The era of crypto Twitter as a market coordination mechanism is coming to an end. The single cultural system that once transformed narratives into capital flows has gradually become ineffective. The rules of the game have been industrialized, returns are distributed more extremely, attention is dispersing, and the market has entered the post-crypto Twitter era. This article is based on an essay by Lauris, organized, translated, and written by Deep潮 TechFlow.
(Previous context: Visa Crypto Lead: The Eight Evolutionary Directions of Cryptocurrency and AI by 2026)
(Additional background: Trump’s embrace of cryptocurrency this year: DAT vaults, tokenized stocks, and the lurking risks of high leverage trading)

Table of Contents

• Why did crypto Twitter used to work?
• Why was a “single culture” era possible?
• Why is the “post-crypto Twitter” era arriving?
  • Additionally, there is a factor that needs brief mention: macroeconomic conditions influence
• What does the “post-crypto Twitter” mean?
• The evolution of crypto Twitter: from engine to interface
• I don’t know what will happen next
• Key points

Welcome to the “post-crypto Twitter” era.

By “crypto Twitter” (CT), Crypto Twitter (, we mean the crypto Twitter that functions as a market discovery and capital allocation engine, not the entire crypto community on Twitter.

“Post-crypto 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 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 are not about “a token’s price tripled,” but about most liquidity market participants focusing their attention on the same thing. In this framework, crypto Twitter was once a mechanism that transformed public narratives into a coordinated flow around a dominant meta-narrative. The significance of the “post-crypto Twitter” 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. The main point of this article is to explain why the previous model worked, why it is declining, and what this means for how the crypto industry might reorganize itself.

( Why did crypto Twitter used to work?

Crypto Twitter )CT( was important because it compressed three market functions into one interface.

The first function of crypto Twitter is narrative discovery. CT is a high-bandwidth salience mechanism. “Salience” )Salience( is not just an academic term for “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 “currently actionable” 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 of its existence but also know that others know, 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 lack of attention.”

The second function of crypto Twitter is to serve as a trust routing mechanism. 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 the result of thousands of participants continuously calculating rough reputation functions in public. People infer who are early entrants, who have good prior judgment, who has resource channels, and whose behavior correlates with positive EV )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 crypto Twitter’s trust mechanism does not rely solely on “number of followers.” It is a combined result of follower count, who is following you, the quality of replies, interactions with credible people, and whether your predictions withstand real-world verification. Crypto Twitter makes these signals easy to observe at very low cost.

Crypto Twitter exhibits public trust, and over time, some communities have also developed a tendency toward more private trust.

The third function is to transform narratives into capital allocation through reflexivity )Reflexivity###. Reflexivity is the key to this core cycle: narratives drive prices, prices verify narratives, verification 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 are not abstractly driving 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 was a “single culture” era possible?

The “single culture” era exists because it has a repeatable structure. Each cycle revolves around objects simple enough for large 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. Think of it 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 what it is in one sentence.

“Meta” )Meta( is the expression of when “toys” become shared game boards. Meta refers to the dominant strategy set and the main objects around which most participants revolve. The power of a “single culture” lies in this meta: it is not just “popularity,” but a shared game across users, developers, traders, and venture firms. Everyone is playing the same game, just on different layers of stacking.

@icobeast has written a wonderful article on the cyclical nature and fundamental change of “trend things,” which I highly recommend.

![])https://img-cdn.gateio.im/social/moments-8d74103f4a-94597353da-8b7abd-e2c905(

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

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

In early stages of each cycle, the market is not fully efficient because the infrastructure supporting meta narratives )Meta( has not yet been fully built. Opportunities exist but have not yet filled the market’s niche. This is very important 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” )The Market for Lemons(:

“Information asymmetry between buyers and sellers causes markets to deviate from efficiency.”

The key is that, for this system to work, you need to provide a highly efficient market for some, while for others, it remains a typical “lemon market” )a market full of information asymmetry and low efficiency(.

A single cultural system also requires a large-scale shared context. Crypto Twitter )CT( provides exactly this context. Shared context is very rare online because attention is usually dispersed. However, when a single culture forms, attention tends to concentrate. This concentration reduces coordination costs and amplifies reflexivity )Reflexivity(.

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

“The information we must utilize is never in the form of centralized or integrated data but is scattered in the incomplete and often contradictory fragments of knowledge held by all individuals.”

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

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

A rough analogy is that mass culture once focused attention on a few shared objects )such as 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 shared context is diminishing, while more localized contexts appear within smaller circles.

) Why is the “post-crypto Twitter” era arriving?

The emergence of “post-crypto Twitter” ###Post-CT( is due to the gradual breakdown of the conditions that supported the “single culture.”

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

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

Memecoins )Memecoins( are a typical example of this dynamic. As an asset class, they are effective because of their low complexity and high reflexivity )Reflexivity(. However, this trait also makes memecoins easy to mass-produce. Once production lines mature, meta narratives turn into assembly lines.

As the market develops, microstructure changes. The median participant no longer trades with ordinary people but against the system. When they enter the market, information has already been widely disseminated, liquidity pools are “pre-baked,” trading paths are optimized, insiders have laid out their positions, and even exit routes are pre-calculated. In such an environment, the expected returns for median participants are compressed to very low levels.

In other words, most of the time, you just become someone else’s “exit liquidity” )Exit Liquidity(.

A useful mental model: early-cycle order flow is mainly driven by naive individual 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 last if it cannot produce enough notable winners to attract the next wave of new participants.

The second failure is that value extraction overwhelms value creation.

“Extraction” )Extraction( here refers to actors and mechanisms that capture liquidity value rather than creating new flows.

In early stages, new participants can increase net liquidity and benefit because the market expansion outpaces the harvesting of value layers. But in later stages, new entrants tend to be net contributors to the value extraction layer. Once this perception is widely recognized, 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 liquidity,” cynicism becomes rational.

To understand 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 domains. 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 doing the same trade” disappears.

) Additionally, there is a factor that needs brief mention: macroeconomic conditions influence

![]###https://img-cdn.gateio.im/social/moments-bce12d843b-2ffc703f1e-8b7abd-e2c905(

The strength of reflexivity cycles. The “single culture” era coincided with a period of strong global risk appetite and liquidity environment, 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 the “post-crypto Twitter” mean?

“Post-crypto Twitter” ###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 )Meta(.

In the “single culture” era, crypto Twitter repeatedly and massively linked narrative consensus with liquidity. In the “post-crypto Twitter” era, this link becomes weaker and more 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 “a trade,” “a toy,” or “a 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 convert into synchronized order flows. When this transformation mechanism fails, even if many activities still occur in the market, the overall feeling will seem “quieter.”

This is also why subjective experience has changed. The market now feels slower and more professional because broad coordination has vanished. Emotional shifts mainly respond to expectations of returns )EV(. The market’s “quietness” does not mean activity is absent but that there is a lack of narratives and synchronized actions capable of triggering global resonance.

) Evolution of crypto Twitter: from engine to interface

Crypto Twitter ###CT( does not disappear but its function shifts.

In early market systems, crypto Twitter was upstream of capital flows, influencing the market direction to some extent. In the current system, it is more like a “interface layer”: broadcasting reputation signals, surfacing narratives, and helping trust routing, but actual capital allocation decisions increasingly happen within higher-trust “subgraphs” )Subgraphs(.

These subgraphs are not mysterious. They are dense networks with higher information quality and frequent interactions among participants, 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 occur behind the scenes in social networks.

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 is now accumulated more in places with higher information quality, restricted access, and more private trust mechanisms, rather than through open, noisy trust calculations.

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

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

) I don’t know what will happen next

I won’t pretend to accurately predict what the next “single culture” ###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 key is that the mechanisms that once fostered “single culture” have already degraded.

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

There are indeed some active areas right now; listing categories that attract attention is not difficult. But I will not mention these areas because it adds no substantive value to the discussion. Overall, aside from pre-sales and some initial distributions, the current trend is that the most overhyped categories tend to be “adjacent” to crypto Twitter )CT( rather than directly driven by it.

) Key points

We have entered the “post-crypto Twitter” ###Post-CT( era.

This is not because crypto Twitter “died,” nor because discussion has lost meaning, but because the structural conditions supporting the recurring “single culture” system have weakened. The game has become more efficient, value extraction mechanisms more mature, attention more dispersed, and reflexivity cycles 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 create broad, low-threshold nonlinear returns has at least ended. Moreover, I believe the likelihood of this phenomenon reoccurring in the next few years is significantly reduced.

This does not mean you cannot make money, nor that the crypto industry is ending. It is neither a pessimistic nor a cynical conclusion. In fact, I have never been more optimistic about the future of this industry. My view is that the distribution of markets and the salience mechanisms in the future will be fundamentally different from the past few years.

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