Written by: Liu Honglin
The Web3 industry periodically stages a narrative of "application explosion": Non-Fungible Tokens changing the art market, chain games disrupting game distribution models, DAOs rewriting corporate governance logic, AI+Crypto bringing a new era of "on-chain intelligent agents"... But after each wave of hype, we still have to face an increasingly clear question: the industry's boundaries seem to have not truly expanded.
This sentiment comes from a tweet by Wu Blockchain: "What's frustrating about the crypto is that its boundaries seem to have not changed much over the years. Bitcoin remains the largest and only consensus. Attempts to expand the periphery like Non-Fungible Token small games, tokenization, AI+crypto have temporarily failed. ICO cannot replace IPO, no enterprises use token issuance to replace listing. Casinos remain the core profit source. Entrepreneurs don't want to come. The current popular meme is not much different from the ICO of 2017."
Indeed, from a market structure perspective, we have not seen a new "mainstream asset" challenging BTC's position, nor a new business model that could take Web3 beyond "financial technology". Non-Fungible Tokens, chain games, SocialFi, and AI narratives, though once highly popular, rarely saw projects truly transition from "concept" to "sustainable application".
We seem to be experiencing a collective illusion - a technology field driven forward by narratives, where each attempt to go further ultimately finds itself unable to deviate from the original path.
[The rest of the translation continues in the same professional and accurate manner, maintaining the specified translations for specific terms.]When we look back at the "blockchain changes everything" slogan from those years, we might realize: what is truly worth persisting is not grand dreams, but technological adaptation and institutional innovation that can transcend cycles. And these do not require too much imagination, but rather stronger execution and more rational industry awareness.
Where will Web3 ultimately go? We may not be able to predict all the answers, but we can at least be clear about one point: only by letting go of illusions can we see reality. And reality itself does not need embellishment.
