Differences in East-West Crypto KOL Narrative Logic: One is idealistic, the other pragmatic

Written by: Crypto Veda

“Chinese Crypto Twitter lacks KOLs, at least in the English-speaking community there are voices representing institutional perspectives like @hosseeb, @KyleSamani, @cdixon, and others. The Chinese community is all self-media — this situation needs to change, or Chinese CT will become more and more degenerate.”

I might have a little bit of say in this matter.

Because of my involvement with @Hertzflow_xyz, I need to frequently interact with various VCs from both the East and the West.

Once you engage with them, you'll notice a very obvious difference:

In the East, people care about how your project makes money — tactics, token issuance, business models, logistics logic — they look at projects as if they are looking at a business;

In the West, they want a big-picture story that can sell 10x, 100x.

This leads to a complete opposite definition of “key opinion leaders” (KOLs) between East and West.

The logic in the East is very clear: deconstruct everything. I am not talented, but I might be the most typical Eastern KOL.

The Western logic is to stand on the shoulders of giants — to solve well-known bottlenecks in highly valued or profitable industries with technology and models. (Teacher Nie Xiao said it well: those who betray me give 1 million, but those loyal to me, a few hundred million, are just a matter of laughter and applause).

The core of Western narrative is that even if you know these stories' details cannot be scrutinized, it doesn't matter. Even if those stories can't be deeply investigated, it doesn't matter. Don't talk about things that are not conducive to unity.

Because they know that the true core of this narrative logic is actually to first come up with a story to fool key capital into joining — then use the “Infinite Funding Method” to saturate potential bottlenecks and competitors, and win.

That's why the biggest narratives, the strongest capital setups, and the most high-brow stories all come from North America, and are told through Western VCs: such as high-performance L1, Rerere-staking, Rollup, FHE, Hyperliquid, etc.

But the vast majority of the most profitable and largest business in this industry are basically in the Eastern camp: CEX, payments, DEX (Pancake, Raydium), aggregators (Jupiter)…

On one hand, this is due to the issue of capital costs (North American institutions' financing costs are close to zero because of national mandates that passive investors like pension funds are forced to buy in).

But more importantly, the social environment in Europe and America is still too affluent. Easterners have witnessed that the best narratives and the most powerful products often end up in one of a thousand “unnatural deaths.” Our social and cultural deconstruction is naturally more PVP than theirs.

Of course, they are now also looking towards the East, and the next generation is heading in the same direction.

So I slightly disagree with the “degeneration” theory — the East is just different, and it’s a kind of difference that goes against the grain.

Only ideas that can cause a fundamental impact on others' thinking are truly successful opinions.

So does this mean that Eastern KOLs challenge the Western narratives that are “less scrutinizable” and replace them with our own “value logic” to be considered successful?

“Since we can't be more like them, let them try to prove they understand us better than we do, in their panic.”