The cryptocurrency world finally enters winter

Bitcoin fell again.

On November 20, the price of Bitcoin fell below the $5,000 mark. Except for a few lucky few, most of the digital currency markets fell by more than 10%.

A week earlier, another batch of blockchain media accounts were blocked.

On November 13, several blockchain media WeChat public accounts including BABI Finance, Wujie Blockchain Pro, Blockchain Investment Insider, Nuclear Finance, etc. were banned. Among them, Wujie Blockchain Pro was the account that Wujie Blockchain re-registered after being banned on August 21. Three months ago, searching for "blockchain" on Xinbang, more than 400,000 WeChat public accounts appeared. On the evening of November 13, this number became 1213.

At the same time, represented by the name change of the once popular cryptocurrency account “Blockchain 3 o’clock sleepless”, the concept of “three o’clock” has bid farewell to the entire industry.

From wild growth to confusion and frustration, the decline of blockchain media is behind the decline of idealism in the entire industry. The once noisy three o'clock sleepless group has long been dormant, and a large number of practitioners have transformed and left. Even Garage Coffee, once the base camp of the cryptocurrency circle, has lost the soul of blockchain.

After the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2000, American writer Lewis wrote in his article "A Defense of Prosperity": "A prosperity without deception is like a dog without fleas." When layoffs, salary cuts, bankruptcy and running away became the end of the blockchain carnival, this world of fame and fortune where dreamers, ambitious people and technology geeks intertwined eventually turned into a meat grinder that harvested greed and regret.

01

Sleep

"This is a great technological revolution in which those who follow it will prosper, while those who go against it will perish. It will subvert tradition more rapidly and thoroughly than the Internet and mobile Internet." This was Xu Xiaoping's speech in the Zhen Fund community in January 2018. After the information was leaked, Xu Xiaoping offered a reward of 1 bitcoin to find the leaker.

This incident officially triggered the entire Internet public opinion's attention to blockchain and the cryptocurrency circle, and the phenomenon of "blockchain and ICO become popular" has intensified. During the Spring Festival, a WeChat group that chose to interpret blockchain knowledge at 3 a.m. suddenly became famous. In this WeChat group, which is known as the first practical group of blockchain, there are Sequoia Capital's Shen Nanpeng, 360 Chairman Zhou Hongyi, angel investors Cai Wensheng and Xue Manzi, and even celebrities such as Gao Xiaosong, Tong Liya, Lin Yun, and Han Geng.

Just as amazing as the all-star lineup of group members is the generosity of the Three O'clock Sleepless Group. It is roughly estimated that the total amount of red envelopes distributed during the seven days of the Chinese New Year holiday alone reached more than 1 million yuan. The most intensive time was February 18th, Xue Manzi's birthday. After Xue Manzi finished sharing that night, a red envelope rain lasted for nearly 20 minutes.

During the entire Spring Festival, it has become a fashion to participate in discussions in the 3:00 AM sleepless blockchain group. Participants in the discussion range from mathematical logic to philosophical thinking, and finally to theological beliefs.

Anxiety began to spread. Countless communities under the banner of "Three O'clock" emerged, all wanting to get on board with this popular IP to cross the social class. However, Yuhong, the creator of this anxiety, made a fortune from it.

Yuhong calls herself a fifth-rate Internet entrepreneur. After she founded Quyou Technology, it was acquired by Zhou Hongyi for $1 billion. Half a month before the Spring Festival holiday, Yuhong knew that Chen Weixing had arrived in Beijing and took the initiative to call to arrange a meeting. To Yuhong's surprise, there were nearly 10 blockchain entrepreneurs present at the time. Chen Weixing chatted with them and invested in several projects after the chat.

Chen Weixing

Yuhong asked Chen Weixing what blockchain was, but Chen Weixing replied, "I'm too lazy to tell you, go check my Moments." Yuhong then went to chat with other people. Although she didn't quite understand, she was still very passionate. On the evening of February 10, Yuhong and a group of friends drank champagne and talked about blockchain. At 2:30 a.m. the next day, she was still excited and didn't want to go home, so she decided to create a group to continue the discussion and named it "3 o'clock blockchain."

This is just the beginning of Yuhong's entry into the cryptocurrency circle. With the help of the connections accumulated in the gaming industry over the years, on the evening of June 3, the entertainment industry public chain "3 o'clock XMX Global Community Alliance" created by Yuhong was born and quickly fissioned. 99 "big Vs" such as Yuhong, Zhao Dong, Xu Gang, Guan Peng, etc. led 99 WeChat groups of 500 people respectively, and the overwhelming "XMX" whirlwind swept through. With the support of 20 nodes, it refreshed the voting record for Huobi HADAX listing.

Chen Weixing is one of the earliest investors in the XMX project. He entered the market for Yuhong without any white paper or other information. Not long after, XMX was exposed for its fake white paper and its code was suspected of plagiarizing EOS. It then fell below its issue price and approached zero.

02

Low Tide

Since the beginning of this year, blockchain self-media has undergone four rounds of purges, the largest of which was on August 21.

On the evening of the same day, a large number of self-media in the blockchain field, including leading self-media such as Golden Finance, Coin World News, Deep Chain Finance, and Huobi Information, were suddenly blocked. On August 20, 7 accounts in the top 50 of the latest blockchain WeChat influence ranking list of "New List" were banned, and 3 of them were in the top 10, namely virtual currency, blockchain worldview and currency circle trends.

In addition to August 21, on March 2 this year, the official public accounts of the same name of OKEX and Huobi, two major domestic virtual digital currency exchanges, were blocked one after another and have not been restored so far; on September 7, a number of blockchain WeChat public accounts were also blocked, including Dianbichengjin, Prince Blockchain, Blockchain No. 1, Afanti, etc.

On October 19, the Cyberspace Administration of China formulated and issued the "Blockchain Information Service Management Regulations (Draft for Comments)", requiring all blockchain information service providers to register. After completing the registration, they must indicate their registration number in a prominent position on the Internet websites, applications and other network platforms that provide services to the outside world.

Under strict supervision, some self-media have begun to transform.

On October 31, the WeChat public account of "Blockchain 3 o'clock sleepless" was renamed "Da Zuan Materials Network", and the content pushed was changed to online romance novels; Mars Finance, which also became popular with the blockchain "3 o'clock group", has long given up the pillar industry of interviewing the bigwigs in the currency circle and launched a digital currency asset management App Mars Coin.

The content department of a leading blockchain self-media is also in name only, and several fresh graduates were forced to seek other opportunities just two months after joining. "I don't really want to find a blockchain-related company, because I don't know when I will be persuaded to quit again." Xiao Lin, a fresh graduate who just quit, feels very confused: "But apart from WeChat typesetting and cryptocurrency trading, I haven't learned anything, and I feel like I won't be able to find a job next time."

The retreat of self-media has also reduced the heat of public opinion caused by the fluctuation of the currency price. When Bitcoin plummeted last week, no one in the group paid attention to it. Instead, there was a lot of discussion about the "selling out" of Renren. Some group members were surprised by the indifference of others and raised objections, but no one responded.

In this regard, Wang Tuanzhang, the founder of the top blockchain self-media "Wang Tuanzhang Blockchain Diary", once joked that the development of people and business in the blockchain industry is diverse: "Blockchain tycoon Bao Erye started out by selling beef, and Li Xiaolai used to be a teacher at New Oriental. Maybe one day a blockchain self-media you know will start selling health products, don't be surprised."

Li Xiaolai

03

Change of hands

"Hello, our company's Xinjiang Kuitun mine has 1,500 slots. Do you need any?" Starting in July, Aliang, a marketing representative at a mine, asked me whether I needed slots for mining machines with increasing frequency, and the unit price kept dropping.

Beibei, a beautiful saleswoman from another technology company, posts at least one message every day on WeChat Moments: "Cameras now available" or "Available anytime." The number of cameras ranges from 8,500 to 10,000, with the latest being 12,000, plus at least one selfie. Recently, she started studying for a master's degree in marketing, and she also lamented on social networks: "Selling cameras was profitable, but then more people did it, and it stopped making money. It gradually became a service to the people - Lu Xun."

Just half a year ago, Zhigang, a partner with 100,000 installed units, lamented calmly: "This business can make quick money. Investment institutions ignored us before, but now they are lining up for quotas."

A Liang said that taking the Antminer S9 as an example, the cost of a machine is currently 2,150 yuan. It can mine less than 0.0145 bitcoins per month, but consumes 1,080 kWh of electricity. Based on the charge of 0.39/kWh, the cost is about 421 yuan. If the price of Bitcoin falls below 40,000 yuan, the machine will lose money if it is used for one year. And the losses have already begun since July.

Aliang and Beibei both felt a little confused. Many of their colleagues had already resigned or changed careers, and they themselves had similar plans. "If I don't resign, I might be laid off soon," said Aliang.

His pessimism is not without reason. A few days ago, Zhang Yi, a business development worker for a blockchain startup project, was suddenly notified to go home and rest while at work. "The boss asked HR to give me the commission that had been delayed for two months, and also said that I would be given an extra month's salary. I was a little confused at the time." The next day, Zhang Yi took the initiative to resign. He found that his entire department's colleagues were also handling the formalities together.

"In a bear market, everything you do is wrong. This industry is so fast-changing." Xiao Lin, the event director of another company, lamented: "Do you know that dozens of events I have canceled? They have been planned for two months. Social security has not been paid for three months. Our IT department was so busy before, working overtime every day, but now there are only a few people left, and the remaining ones have nothing to do."

04

Departure

Garage Coffee is a holy place in the cryptocurrency circle. It is famous in the cryptocurrency circle because Li Xiaolai once preached here. Five years ago, desperate people from Beijing, elites from Tsinghua University and Peking University, and cunning investors met here to listen to Li Xiaolai speaking on the stage in words they could not understand. A young man from Shanxi nicknamed Erbao sat in the front row and listened attentively.

Five years later, Erbao became Bao Erye and built a leek farm in the United States. He held banquets day and night, just like Gatsby returned to New York.

Five years later, Garage Coffee has lost its former vitality. This winter, a group of impoverished migrant workers from Beijing still gather in Garage Coffee, but the mention of blockchain and Bitcoin is no longer heard in their conversations. Participating in entrepreneurial competitions, publishing best-selling books and project roadshows are their dreams to strive for.

Garage Coffee

Another person who suffered a huge gap was Zhang Jian, the founder of Fcoin. He was once the CTO of Huobi.com. After leaving the cryptocurrency circle for three years, he returned strongly with a new model of "mining is trading". The trading scale surpassed Huobi.com, OKex, and Binance a few days after the platform was launched, breaking the long-standing dominance of the latter three and triggering a nationwide carnival and controversy. But not long after, the price of mined FTs fell all the way, users withdrew on a large scale, and Zhang Jian disappeared in China.

More similar projects were born in silence and died in silence.

A former project partner frowned and kept emphasizing to me: "The market changes too fast and we entered the market too late. To be honest, I think our project is actually quite good. I feel very sorry that we did not enter the market at the right time. Sometimes I feel that we are really unlucky. Why do so many junk projects make money while we fail? But we still can't think like this. The more we think about it, the angrier we get. This is the opportunity, but we didn't seize it. We don't know when the next opportunity will be."

The third floor of Garage Coffee, which used to be a popular venue for blockchain salons, has now been converted into a joint office area, with only one Korean company operating normally. A Shandong woman called Hao Ye is in charge of the overall situation. You can rent a workstation here for only 1,800 yuan per month, and you can get a discount if you rent more.

When asked about Mr. Hao, were there many blockchain startups in this area?

Mr. Hao smiled without saying anything, turned around and left, leaving behind a thin figure.