Opinion: The era of blockchain industry where technology is king has passed, and marketing is king in the future.

Source: Lightning HSL

For several years after 2012, I was a loyal member of Logic Thinking. There was a hot topic at that time: Is ‘Content is King’ correct?

It’s about writing articles. Shouldn’t the quality of the content be put first and give up marketing strategies, such as whether to put the article format, easy dissemination, reader-friendly… Are these placed in a more important position? Anyway, everyone understands.

And the discussion about content being king has also expanded to other industries. Is it correct that product is king? In the catering industry, there was a master called Diao Ye Beef Noodles who opened many noodle-based restaurants with strong marketing capabilities. I was fooled into eating a bowl, but it didn’t taste good.

But everyone’s focus is not on whether the noodles themselves taste good, but on various internet marketing techniques.

Looking back now, can you come to a definite conclusion on the debate of ‘Content is King’ and ‘Product is King’ from 10 years ago? Who was right and who was wrong?

I feel that the world is too complex, and economic behavior is especially complex. Both sides have supporting evidence and counterexamples.

Going back 10 years, I still feel that product is king, content is king, and providing users with high-quality products has a promising future.

But in this era, at least in China, I feel that material wealth has become extremely abundant, and marketing has become more promising.

Speaking of the catering industry, it’s all about pre-made dishes. You need to occupy the traffic entrance and channels in order to sell them. Whether they taste good or not is not your concern.

Look at the mobile phone automobile industry, everything is far ahead, how can there be a little product is king, isn’t it all cowhide is king?

I think that the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry may have reached a watershed moment where marketing is king or technology is king.

I often encounter such a question: I want to enter the cryptocurrency circle, do I need to learn the underlying technology? Do you want to master UTXOs, transaction data structures, PoW principles, and decentralization…

If marketing is the king, then the answer is obvious, there is no need. Why not study popular psychology and positioning theory, isn’t it more promising?

But if technology is the king, then the answer is definitely yes, otherwise you will become a leek when you come in.

I think with the approval of BTC ETF listing by the US SEC, marketing may be the key.

In the era of technology supremacy, it is because there are no truly high-quality products.

The most important quality of blockchain is decentralization, and the best product should have true technology in this dimension of decentralization.

However, with the strong intervention of legal and compliant forces, the decentralization feature is unlikely to be so important in the short to medium term.

It’s legal and compliant, why bother with decentralization? The risk of being caught has been greatly reduced.

If the mainstream community of coin traders can accept paper bitcoins, concepts like decentralization, self-custody, and no-KYC should become less important.

Another reason is that I feel that the big technological innovations of blockchain and encrypted digital currencies seem to have come to an end, and the rest are minor repairs, and there may not be any more paradigm-level innovations. **

Just like mobile phones and computers, they have already entered the era of marketing dominance. The most critical reason should be that the performance of these computers is basically redundant for the majority of users, and there is no real innovation that users need. There is no need to focus on camera pixels and glass hardness, it is not necessary.

Smart cars have not yet entered the era where marketing is king, because intelligent driver assistance does have huge innovation space.

It seems that several of the biggest problems in blockchain and cryptocurrency have been solved. The scalability problem has rollup and sharding solutions; the decentralized technology problem seems to have been mostly resolved with consensus mechanisms like PoS and PoW; privacy has usable zero-knowledge proofs; and there are already significant use cases such as digital currency and DeFi.

At least in the past two years, there have been no major technological updates in the cryptocurrency industry, only minor improvements on existing technologies.

The technology in the currency circle has no threshold, everyone is open source, and anyone can use it.

In the future, if cryptocurrency projects want to be more awesome, they may have to rely mainly on marketing. Talking about technological innovation may only be minor innovations.

The inscription that was on fire this year can also be considered a case where marketing is king.

In terms of technology, the technology used in inscriptions is a very old client verification technology. Even adding transaction formats like taproot is just a way to write data to the chain, which is not really a cool thing.

I feel that the place where the inscriptions are awesome is really well-publicized. With the slogan of building the Bitcoin ecosystem, relying on the huge user base, brand effect and amount of funds of Bitcoin, it makes people believe that this category can have huge growth potential.

This may be a case of traffic x conversion rate x customer unit price in a traditional business model.

Perhaps the cryptocurrency industry will start collaborating with various companies for advertising, branding, public relations, etc.