Emotion Market Makers: KOLs are Toxic Order Flows

Author: Zuo Ye Web3

The trend of media personalities opening accounts associated with altcoins has subsided, and the "holy fathers" and "holy mothers" of the crypto world have also found their own "sons."

It seems like nothing happened; the media doesn't have to take responsibility for the massive dumping of altcoins, and exchanges don't have to pay the price for the complete damage to the industry's image.

Reflected in the public opinion market, KOLs are generally extreme and band together. Behind Kaito Meimei's departure and Agency's subtle harvest, the cheater BNB players clashed with everyone, ultimately triggering a ridiculous civil war.

All that's left is noise.

Since the advent of Bitcoin in 2009, the history of cryptocurrencies has been a perfect Pareto curve, with the early lucky ones reaping immeasurable wealth, and all the actions of those who followed revolving around them in cyclical movements.

Image caption: The bull-bear cycle has completely ended.

Image source: @zuoyeweb3

Fawning over Binance or complaining about the unfairness of OKX's lottery is just a way of whining. Exchanges are the ceiling for KOLs, while project teams and big investors are like the masses, only humbling themselves to learn when hot topics emerge, or engaging in one-off marketing campaigns to attract users before launching a coin.

There are no long-term partnerships between LatePoint and major tech companies here, and there's a lack of fertile ground for the emergence of industry-level KOLs. You have to choose a side.

More seriously, public blockchains and USDC/USDT stablecoins no longer need media relations in the crypto world; lobbying, capital operations, and political connections are more crucial than KOLs.

Mr. Beast is venturing into the FinTech industry, while crypto KOLs can only clumsily learn about US stocks.

Why?

Information, as a commodity, only has economic value when there is an information gap and an overlap of consensus.

• Early miners, compared to buying and selling Bitcoin and Ethereum, had highly controllable investment and holding costs. Similar to how early participants in pyramid schemes can always exit in time, CZ was already adept at this during the stamp and coin era.

• Late-stage assets all believe that everything in traditional finance will be on-chain, but without the widespread anticipation of The Merge and BTC spot ETFs, those who are fully invested in altcoins cannot wait for capital outflows.

You either become a miner and producer in the early stages, or a large investor and rentier in the later stages. If you enter the market in between, you can only desperately shout that the bull market will come again. As the number of KOLs increases, very few people can leave the market gracefully.

The market-recognized Binance-affiliated KOLs have all been turned against by their own entities. Just like Binance discarding its own "friendship coins," coin-issuing editors, and listing brokers, the giant has begun to tear down its own edges and maintain a mechanical existence.

Furthermore, the introduction of AI will only be a disaster for the cryptocurrency market and public opinion.

When it comes to interpreting SEC policies, verifying the qualifications of stablecoin issuers, and conducting due diligence on project teams, the interpretive abilities required of KOLs are highly comparable to those of traditional consulting, auditing, or legal professionals.

Since these industries are already in the process of being replaced by AI, it's better to just learn AI directly.

The problem is that AI is a great professional assistant, and professional programmers can use AI as a productivity multiplier, but most people can only create a small tool with a cool interface.

In reality, AI has never improved KOLs' ability to interpret and disseminate professional issues. For example, you can see many independent developer KOLs, but you rarely use their products. You see many crypto KOLs' short posts, but their awareness of personal IP is declining.

The information gap has led to the collapse of the technological advantage of Solana/Aptos and other Ethereum killers into the fact that agents need stablecoins, and the repeated self-reassurance that agents need stablecoins means that cryptocurrencies still have a future.

Stablecoins and RWA are merely tools in the crypto industry. If they don't have the value to be sold as assets, they will ultimately be valued as SaaS.

In contrast, a huge sense of bewilderment surrounds native crypto assets. Everyone knows that MegaETH will follow in the footsteps of Monad/Scroll, but the gamblers have a license, and everyone has to cooperate to finish this show.

In the post-truth era, it's not that KOLs and media figures are using AI to create false information, nor that recommendation algorithms are flooding the market with "digital garbage." Rather, it's that ordinary people's suffering index is too high, and they can only find temporary peace by embracing emotional K-lines.

There is no such thing as a post-truth era, only garbage time that rejects the truth.

Did Du Jun not know that BTCFi was a joke, yet he still insisted on selling the BTC/ETH L2 project and then retreating into Bitcoin's room?

Super liquidity of opinions

The cryptocurrency market is inevitably entering the latter half of the Pareto curve. The arrow of time cannot turn back, and with diminishing marginal returns, a zero-sum game (I gain, you lose) is unavoidable. Do not harbor any illusions.

For the crypto industry, the value of a free market of opinions lies in finding the next asset with " uptrend " potential. Studying whether Google can be held long-term or whether Bitcoin will fall to $50,000 is meaningless, as these assets have already proven themselves over a long period.

For the public opinion market, the anchor of a solidified market structure lies in abandoning the foreign concept of KOLs, and information market makers are the most appropriate choice.

Image caption: Asset discovery and information delivery cycle

Image source: @zuoyeweb3

After the end of the technology narrative, the asset narrative and retail purchasing power are disconnected. US stocks and bonds need to go through stablecoins and Ondo to introduce on-chain narratives. Existing viewpoints and LPs are insufficient to explain this complexity, and the AMM or CLOB perspective must be introduced.

Hyperliquid doesn't do marketing, but the algorithm barriers of traditional Twitter (X), WeChat, and Xiaohongshu, coupled with PumpFun's practice of distributing coins like "Happy Beans," ultimately led to the extreme probability market phenomenon of Ticker.

All that is in the past. Compared to these asset issuance paradigms, the opinion market has only evolved to a manual collaborative society like an Agency, which does not fit the future asset discovery narrative. It is not about discovering crypto assets or AI assets, but rather the assets of the next era and the next generation .

If everyone patiently observes the movements of the exchanges, a tendency towards centralization is becoming increasingly inevitable.

Their goal is to profit from job arbitrage between various project teams and exchanges. They don't want to start their own businesses and make a fortune; they only want to engage in power struggles among senior executives. Externally, they cannot understand the impact of AI on the industry, and internally, they cannot improve the user experience.

The asset holder, Lao Denghua, the opinion disseminator, Zhong Denghua, and only Xiao Denghua remains, bewildered in the wind.

If Perp DEX is already on its way to replacing CEX, then to replace the current information market, information market makers will at least need to know where to focus their efforts.

• The old guard should be phased out, including Binance's "Parents and Kids" team and Xu Mingxing, who should step down to the second line to hold cryptocurrency and earn industry beta returns.

• With the introduction of new talent and the opportunity to allow RWA to expand overseas, there is a great need for financial professionals to step in and facilitate the exchange of information and funds.

• The reform mechanism of Easy Mode, which involves distributing project information in groups, will not bring incremental growth. It will either require the ability to discover new assets or it will transform into a pyramid scheme and move offline .

The sense of powerlessness in the face of AI and the confusion in the industry both require us to establish a sense of mission as founders. Simply matching business information between exchanges and project teams is meaningless for the sake of transaction volume.

Friends of altcoins (crypto media professionals) do not possess much information analysis ability; what they have is the inertia of their media brand. Old Deng, who became rich early, has an absolute advantage in capital, but he does not necessarily have stronger capital operation ability. The scale of capital masks their clumsiness.

The fact that the whale behind Yilihua cut its losses and left, and that Peter Thiel took advantage of the DAT downturn to leave, both prove that early first-mover advantage is more crucial. You can keep making mistakes, but early low-cost accumulation will save you time and time again.

Under the framework of information market makers, any content surrounding current hot topics and figures is just a clue. The undercurrents beneath the surface are what the media should dig into. If the media does not have this ability to discover, it is recommended to open Douyin and watch pretty girls.

Following the great path pioneered by DeFi, professional market makers must first be transformed into AMMs in order to evolve into further professional CLOB Perp DEXs.

In other words, every individual should treat media as a complementary business. It's not that KOLs should take the CPA exam, but rather that CPA holders should become KOLs. The next step in information matching is capital matching .

Conclusion

From everyone profiting to everyone going to extremes, it's only been a little over a decade. No money has been made, and the shame associated with working in the industry is growing day by day.

When money is engineered into stablecoins and AI is engineered into computing power, information should not remain at the manual stage; everyone's participation must be mobilized to attract capital.

The current pattern of a few major KOLs and a majority of small retail investors cannot bring the new user growth that exchanges are eagerly anticipating. It is hoped that a super information market maker will emerge in 2026.

The idea of ​​"Mom and Dad, love me again" is too abstract. It's not that the child is abstract; the child will only imitate what they see. The parents are the ones who bear the primary responsibility.

Don't become Wang Lin or Epstein; become the Peter Thiel or Lü Buwei of the new era, and always hoard the rare commodities of the next stage.