Crypto Community Shift

Siqi Chen reflects on how the cryptocurrency community has evolved dramatically from 2017 to 2024, shifting from technically-focused early adopters to a much more mainstream audience with different motivations and behaviors.

Key Points:

• Ethereum vs. Solana Community Differences:

  • 2017 Ethereum users: "Very deep tech people... they're like nerdy"
  • 2024 Solana users: "So much more mainstream"
  • "A lot of people maybe have like $50-100 and they're just trying to turn it into a thousand dollars"
  • "The amount of emotion there is like very very different"

• Visual and Cultural Shift:

  • "Crypto transitioned from neck beards to like everybody who looks like Jack Harlow in like four years"
  • The Solana community "all has like the line etched into the side of their haircut"
  • "It's very different than like the people that got me into Ethereum in the first place"

• Trading Behavior Changes:

  • New platforms like Pump.fun allow token creation "in literally like thirty seconds"
  • People are "basically trading these new coins and trading them trying to ride it"
  • "It's basically musical shares"
  • The platform reportedly made "$500,000,000 of profit last year... or more"

• Watch Wallets and Copy Trading:

  • People track notable wallets: "What is Vitalik doing with his wallet"
  • Bots monitor and copy trades: "There were bots like just monitoring what I was doing and buying whatever I was buying"
  • This can create rapid price movements: "Within 100-200 seconds the market cap of this token was 3 and a half million dollars"

• Community Reactions:

  • Less understanding of technical explanations: "People just don't read on the internet"
  • More emotional responses to price drops: "I crashed the price of this token and people got very upset"
  • Different expectations: "A lot of these people are fairly low income and the money is fairly meaningful"