Author: DeFi Dave
Compiled by: Yangz, Techub News
Crypto is in the midst of a narrative crisis. Sure, we’ve made great strides technically, with orders of magnitude improvements in infrastructure, throughput, and scalability. But culturally, the industry has reached a kind of stagnation, and a large part of that is due to our inability to tell compelling stories. Outside of Bitcoin and the Solana memecoin, the industry has failed to attract new organic players for years, and the resulting cloud of nihilism is looming over the industry, especially Ethereum and its surrounding ecosystem.
However, what is the antidote? Simply telling a story is not enough, and marketing is even less effective. We must build a lore system. Lorebuilding is not just about repeating a narrative, but about setting a stage for people to jointly create a shared mythological universe.
At the time of writing this article, it is still difficult for me to fully summarize the full connotation of "legend building". This new concept is still under development. The discussion in this article is only a phased result. In the future, I will further expand and clarify the concept through a series of articles, and provide more examples to support my views. I also hope that more people can join the discussion and bring their unique thoughts and interpretations.
Go build a legend, my friend.
"Lorebuilding" aims to cultivate a living narrative system that can gain insight into current real-life issues, absorb memes that have universal resonance and are timeless, and ultimately weave stories that people can identify with and then participate in the creation of together. "Lorebuilders" are those who can identify emerging trends, understand their historical context, and absorb collective emotions to weave them into coherent and fascinating narratives. They are like the prophets in the legend. A wise builder will not force the direction, but listen to and guard the process, and follow the evolution of the legend itself. The construction of legends cannot be forged and there are no shortcuts. You must practice it yourself and immerse yourself in it.
Legend building begins with an idea or a group of ideas, like a seed, sown by the Genesis Lorebuilder in fertile cultural soil and taking root in the minds of early believers. If a legend crosses a critical point and becomes strong enough, it will attract different groups to join and contribute their own rituals, memes or actions. Just like the growth of tree rings, the participation of each generation carves a new mark on the legend, injecting new meaning and momentum.
The three levels of legendary influence are: attention, resonance, and co-creation.
The first level of “attention”: people only put in a small amount of energy but have not really invested;
The second level is “resonance”: people begin to feel a sense of belonging and establish an identity with it;
The third level is “co-creation”: people are deeply engaged and contribute to the legend in their own way - it can be a simple inside joke or copypasta, or it can be a landmark event or a completely new narrative that attracts new members.
The essence of legend is a narrative co-creation shaped by collective experience. Its highest form is to sublimate repeated actions and memes into a common culture, so that people feel a sense of belonging and take action for it, and ultimately form a spiritual lineage worth passing down from generation to generation.
The legend of Bitcoin and Ethereum
If we want to list examples of legend building, Bitcoin and Ethereum are undoubtedly the best examples, and Satoshi Nakamoto can be called the "Abrahamic Lorebuilder" of both. Similar to Abraham being the common ancestor of the three major religions, Satoshi Nakamoto's ideas are not only the cornerstone of Bitcoin, but also provide inspiration for countless protocols. Bitcoin and Ethereum have existed for more than ten years, which gives us enough space to trace the complete trajectory of their birth and evolution.
Bitcoin: From Genesis to Cultural Phenomenon
The legend of Bitcoin begins with its creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, he first sparked systematic questioning of the modern political and financial order. In the original white paper, Bitcoin was described as a "peer-to-peer electronic cash system" rooted in the idea that sovereign currency is governed by code rather than human institutions, while characteristics such as decentralization, censorship resistance, and scarcity are written directly into the underlying protocol.
In fact, Bitcoin is not the first attempt at digital currency (there were DigiCash, Bit Gold and Hashcash before), but Satoshi Nakamoto's breakthrough is that he integrated the achievements of his predecessors (proof of work, digital signatures, scarcity mechanism), and innovatively introduced designs such as the "longest chain rule" and the "halving mechanism". When he engraved "The Times, January 3, 2009: The Chancellor of the Exchequer is on the brink of a second round of bailouts for the banking industry" on the Genesis block, the seed had been buried in the cultural soil. Since then, the community has spontaneously become the cultivator of legends. They created the principle of "anonymity", created memes such as "HODL", established rituals such as Bitcoin Pizza Day, and tempered the collective traumatic memory of "Not your keys, not your coins" through the Mt.Gox incident.
If we retell the history of Bitcoin from the perspective of legend construction, it can be roughly divided into the following periods:
Satoshi Nakamoto and the Cypherpunk Era : Laying the Ideological Foundation
Ross Ulbricht and the Silk Road Era : Verifying the First Real Use Case
"Bitcoin Jesus" Roger Ver : Funding the first generation of startups
Michael Saylor and the Wall Street Era : Bringing Bitcoin to Institutional Circles
Ethereum: Programmable Legend Iteration
Bitcoin pioneered the legend of cryptocurrency, and Ethereum is like an apple that fell by the tree. Ethereum's founder Vitalik Buterin came from the Bitcoin world. He was initially active in the community as a co-founder and writer for Bitcoin Magazine, and after participating in multiple projects, he finally forged his own path.
Ethereum has taken the concept of Bitcoin to a new level, programming the sovereign property. If Bitcoin has realized the vision of "exiting the old system", then Ethereum has created the possibility of "building a new world from scratch". Bitcoin's scripting language is optimized for currency scarcity, while Ethereum, as a Turing-complete universal virtual machine, breeds a fertile "infinite garden", which is the foundation of its "world computer" legend. The seeds of DeFi, NFT, and DAO have long been deeply rooted in Ethereum's genes, waiting for generations of legend builders to carefully water them.
Ethereum was officially launched on July 30, 2015. The same newspaper headline as Bitcoin was engraved in its genesis block: "The Times, January 3, 2009: Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banking industry", which is not only a tribute to the predecessors, but also closely connects the two legendary bloodlines.
The uniqueness of Ethereum's legendary construction lies in its layered construction model. In addition to Vitalik, early builder Joe Lubin founded ConsenSys and incubated developer tools such as MetaMask, Infura, and Truffle, which greatly lowered the threshold for building Ethereum. More importantly, ConsenSys also brought hundreds of Ethereum builders to Brooklyn and New York City, sowing the seeds for New York City to become one of the most important cryptocurrency centers in the world. At its peak, ConsenSys had more than 1,200 employees. Although it has undergone strategic adjustments, the foundation it has laid has always nourished the generational changes of the Ethereum ecosystem.
The current status of Bitcoin and Ethereum legend construction
Bitcoin’s simplicity allows new legend builders to create new stories. For example, Michael Saylor took up the torch and led Bitcoin into the Wall Street era. Today, Bitcoin has become a regulated ETF and has received the seal of approval from the traditional financial system.
In contrast, Ethereum is slightly more complicated, and its legend is built layer by layer. From the ICO craze, the summer of DeFi, the NFT craze to the DAO revival, each era reflects the proposition of "what can be built on Ethereum" while continuing its spiritual bloodline.
However, in recent years, the legend of Ethereum has weakened dramatically as the potential energy that was originally gathered has been continuously diverted. People's attention and mind share have been divided up by various L2s and alternative L1s - and just a few years ago, these projects could directly attract users to Ethereum itself. Although L2 was originally on the roadmap and was moving forward as planned, they have essentially severed the original heritage of Ethereum. I would even go so far as to say that today's L2 is spiritually an independent L1. (I will discuss this argument in a later article)
Marketing is not just about legend building
Worse still, we are witnessing a repetition of an “assembly line” approach that emphasizes numbers over stories: public chains raise huge amounts of money, conduct short-term marketing campaigns, and after completing token issuance, the entire ecosystem quickly evaporates. This model is unsustainable, and the more it goes on, the more likely cryptocurrencies will be eaten alive by themselves. In the blind pursuit of indicators, legend building has been replaced by marketing, and profound myths have been replaced by cheap slogans.
Today, we see superficial goals that attract mercenary participants. Metrics that once represented progress have been gamified to the point of meaninglessness. Users are viewed as data points to be optimized, not souls to be enlightened. It’s a Faustian bargain that has ultimately led us to our current state of ennui and disillusionment.
There is nothing inherently wrong with marketing—it’s a tried-and-true business practice. The problem is that when marketers enter the crypto space without any knowledge of the cultural context and story behind it, marketing without the backing of a legend can be hollow at best and a sham at worst. For cryptocurrencies, especially Ethereum, to get out of their current slump, they must first abandon this pure marketing mentality once and for all.
Conclusion
Legend building is the spiritual infrastructure that brings communities together, giving meaning to individuals and a sense of belonging to groups. However, when much of the industry forgets about it and instead chases cold metrics that gain short-term attention, we completely lose the ability to retain it in the long term.
Fortunately, hope has not yet been lost. We can wake up from this collective amnesia and restart the great work of legend building. There are countless precedents for us to study, emulate and innovate. Only by stopping self-deception can we let the pendulum of history swing back to the right track.
I look forward to a world where thousands of legend builders weave narrative symphonies together, and active communities continue to create new technologies and foster new cultures through collaboration. As long as we break the self-imposed limitations of information cocoons and replace individual actions with joint actions, a renaissance of narrative revival and legend reconstruction will be within reach.
