Crypto circles have so much hype and fluff around the sidelines. A market worth tens of millions a year gets fed—some exchanges just go greedy and purchase plenty of it to get full.

Even Macau casino operators know how to throw in something valuable, or high-end luxury goods.

If only exchanges put in a bit of effort into customer retention, I feel like every time, these “merch” would be collectibles.

It’s a pity, though. I’ve actually always wanted to add customizable merch on ChainGas. Take the Caishen Temple demo I made—you can see my costs are definitely lower than this kind of clothing. But my product uses high-precision resin 3D printing, embeds a Raspberry Pi (which I’ll mass-replace later with new dev boards), and it comes with voice. It also has WiFi, so you can directly bind it to IP and connect various AI. Once you’re done, the merch has real value—at least people receive something they won’t just dump on Xianyu or shove into a storage room.

I’ve been hired by many exchanges myself. Every time I see the merch approval process and look at the merch cost, I just want to laugh. As half a Yiwu person, my products are sold to Europe, America, and Africa. Seeing that per-order price, I can only say: the exchanges’ own greedy guys have eaten so much greed they’ve swollen up into a 5p big cream puff.

No one is unlikely to be willing to put a Caishen Temple like mine on the desktop. And this is just one of the simplest models. I have tons and tons of different merch IDs, and a whole crew of top designers who spend every day trading futures and losing money.

Still, to put it plainly: if the exchanges’ internal greedy guys can eat a single merch project so far that it turns into a cream puff, what about the other departments? In a circle like this—greedy up top, greedy down below, everyone is greedy. Do you think there’s any future?

Why is it that, even though I clearly have the lowest cost to make merch, I don’t do it? Because all those departments are already tied together by利益. You can’t get into their core circle.