When evaluating the value of these projects, we need to reflect on popular technological determinism, background determinism, Infra worship, and other inherent thinking, and return to product and growth.

By: NingNing

At a time when "questioning Ponzi" is seen as naive and "understanding Ponzi, becoming Ponzi" has become the mainstream idea, Loki's new work is like a beam of light into the "Plato's Cave," reminding the crypto industry deep in the cave to collectively turn back to face the real world and solve real problems. (For more details, see "Returning to Growth Drive: How VC Coins Break Free from Narrativism's Struggle?")

No matter how prosperous the study of Ponzi is, I don't believe Ponzi will be the endgame of crypto. No matter how sophisticated the design of a Ponzi scheme is, it is essentially a physical dissipative system that requires continuous input of energy or matter from the outside to maintain its structure and function.

Observing the Ponzi scheme from the perspective of a physical dissipative system:

• "Low entropy" energy = funds from new investors
• "Ordered structure" of the system = hierarchical structure of investors
• "High entropy" waste = loss of funds and erosion of trust
• Decrease in energy quality = requiring more and more new funds to maintain the same rate of return
• Limited external resources = the potential investor base is limited
• Accumulation of entropy = overall decline in market trust
• Rising cost of structure maintenance = increasing cost of attracting new investors

Just as any dissipative system will eventually collapse because it cannot obtain enough "low entropy" energy, a Ponzi scheme will inevitably disintegrate due to the exhaustion of new funds. This is not accidental, but the inevitable result of the law of increasing entropy.

The crypto industry has come to this day, thanks to the early evangelism of Bitcoin OGs and later top VCs such as A16Z, Pentera, etc., constantly creating new narratives and building new primitives. From the perspective of the study of Ponzi, they are creating schemes on one hand, attracting new investor funds on the other, and then exiting during bull market cycles. However, this "business model" has possibly reached the upper limit of this dissipative system today. For example, the penetration rate of cryptocurrencies in the US market has exceeded 20%.

The path to breaking the pattern lies in the age-old practice of building continuously innovative, efficient, and value-creating projects. This is because continuous innovation, efficiency improvement, and value creation can keep the system in a "far from equilibrium" state, under which the system may produce new, unexpected structures and functions, further enhancing its sustainability.

Therefore, the crypto industry urgently needs its own "ChatGPT" moment. Recently popular new tracks such as PayFi, Consumer Chain, AI Agent with Crypto Wallet, and Chain Abstraction have emerged as new solutions under such environmental pressure.

Of course, when evaluating the value of these projects, we need to reflect on popular technological determinism, background determinism, Infra worship, and other inherent thinking, and return to product and growth.

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