Is Culture the Public Blockchain's "Hard Currency"?

Original Article Title: Culturementals Are the New Fundamentals
Original Article Authors: @13300RPM, @FourPillarsFP Researchers
Original Article Translation: zhouzhou, BlockBeats

Editor's Note: The competition in the crypto industry is shifting from a technological race to a cultural resonance, with Culture Chains emerging as a new trend. Technology is now "good enough," and the key to the future lies in community atmosphere and resonance. Investors should focus on believers, inside jokes, and community culture, rather than just code performance. Culture Chains provide exclusive ecosystems for fans and creators, but they also face challenges such as excessive speculation and liquidity fragmentation. Successful Culture Chains need a strong community, open development, and composability to truly become the core battleground of the next cycle.

Below is the original content (slightly reorganized for better readability):

Imagine a blockchain where the killer feature is not a disruptive consensus algorithm or astonishing TPS, but rather, ambiance. On this chain, people gather not because of lower Gas fees, but due to inside jokes, shared identity, and meme culture. Sounds absurd? Yet the crypto world time and time again proves that culture often surpasses technology.

Think of $DOGE (and a dozen other similar coins), a complete joke born out of a meme, yet inexplicably skyrocketed to a multi-billion dollar asset valuation without any technological innovation. Bitcoin's early development relied more on cypherpunk beliefs than the code itself. Ethereum's most loyal users often say, "I came for the tech, but stayed for the community." Events like ETHGlobal hackathons and global Devcons have long transcended the code itself, becoming cultural bonds among developers.

The crypto world has evolved into a stage where participation itself is the product—a immersive social game that blends finance, ideology, and culture.

Welcome to the era of Culture Chains: where the core of blockchain is not what it can do, but who it's for.

1. Culture as Product

Culture Chains are a new vertical SaaS for fan economies.

In simple terms, Culture Chains are blockchains imbued with cultural spirit—they are tailored for specific communities, subcultures, or movements. Unlike generic L1s (trying to meet all needs) or Appchains running a single dapp, Culture Chains occupy a unique middle ground. They are designed as playgrounds for those who share the same ambiance or goal, accommodating multiple applications and serving a specific community.

From this definition, perhaps it can be said that every blockchain has its own culture. Ethereum blends cypherpunk ethos with institutionalized thinking, emphasizing decentralization, programmability, and neutrality. In contrast, Solana is full of speed, chaos, and financial speculation, shaped by its high throughput, low-cost architecture.

However, the difference is that these cultural identities are more of a byproduct of technical design rather than a deliberate shaping. General blockchains tend to spontaneously form some kind of unique culture, while cultural chains are fundamentally designed for a cultural economy from the protocol level. The real distinction lies in the intentionality behind it.

Imagine a blockchain where every dapp serves anime art collectors, hardcore degen gamers, RPG enthusiasts, or fans of a specific NFT ecosystem. Users use the same jargon, rally around the same hot topics, and laugh at the same memes. This is more like a digital city-state running on a blockchain.

If a general-purpose public chain is more like a diverse but chaotic international metropolis, then a cultural chain is more like a theme park or a Renaissance fair—a highly customized, precisely tailored to the needs of a specific audience. By focusing on a niche community, it can be fully optimized in terms of technology, governance, tokenomics, etc., to better serve the values and needs of that community.

They are blockchains designed for cultural monetization, expansion, and preservation.

This design can take various forms:

· Infrastructure optimized for specific creators or media flows

· Built-in revenue sharing or tokenized copyright split mechanisms

· Governance models tailored to creative communities

· Incentive mechanisms for fans to participate, fund, and discover new content

Essentially, cultural chains are an evolution of the concept of "vertical blockchains": instead of trying to be all-encompassing, they focus on a niche area. Their goal is to be the "preferred blockchain for X field," where X represents a community or application scenario with cultural cohesion. The assumption behind this idea is that by focusing on a specific cultural niche, they can more effectively bring together like-minded users and developers and create a stronger network effect than a general-purpose public chain. Their strength comes from focus.

2. Code Can Be Copied, but Atmosphere Cannot

In the world of crypto, community is more important than technology. When choosing a chain, pay attention to the number of believers on each block, not just TPS.

Is culture really more important than code? Many tech geeks scoff at this notion. After all, blockchain infrastructure involves mathematics, cryptography, engineering, game theory—it's "hardcore tech." However, despite the idea that code is law, in the crypto world, culture is king. In the end, it is the social layer that determines which "laws" (code) will truly be adopted.

A perfect protocol, if not believed in by anyone, is a dead end; whereas a rough Meme coin, with a group of fervent believers, is enough to move the market.

Essentially, a crypto network is a social network with banking functionality, and human nature is the core driver of adoption: FOMO, tribalism, identity, belief. These things cannot be directly forked on GitHub.

Think about Bitcoin Cash, a fork of Bitcoin—little technical changes, but significant cultural divide (big blocks vs. small blocks), ultimately determining the outcome. The Ethereum community also once forked into Ethereum Classic due to ideological differences—same code, but different culture, leading to very different results.

Meme and narrative hold atomic-level power in this industry

Remember DeFi Summer? Yield Farming was booming back then, driving this wave was not only smart contracts, but also a bunch of degens shouting "farm and dump" and "all in ape," igniting this movement together. Look at the NFT craze: why did JPEGs on Ethereum skyrocket in value? Not because ERC-721 technology is so magical (it's actually quite simple), but because a group of digital art collectors, show-offs, and community players, revolving around projects like CryptoPunks, Bored Apes, built a unique cultural circle. The technology provides verifiable ownership, but what truly drives the craze is social prestige and community belonging.

The long-term success of a public chain often depends on its community moat. This is the paradox of the crypto world: the strongest moat is not hash power, nor TPS, but belief. Value not only exists in the code, but also in the culture that surrounds it.

This unquantifiable "magic" can make people tattoo the project's logo on their arm or hold onto it even during a 90% drawdown. It can turn early users into evangelists, making a product "inevitable." The cultural chain is based on this insight, betting on the power of niche enthusiast communities rather than a mass-market general solution.

3. Stop Chasing TAM, Start with Tribes

A general-purpose blockchain hopes for users to come, a cultural chain inherently comes with users.

But the key question is: is this model really viable? A new blockchain paradigm must be technically feasible and economically scalable to truly survive.

Unlike the past narratives of blockchain trying to disrupt entire industries, the concept of Culture Chains has taken a more pragmatic approach. Instead of requiring a complete rebuild of infrastructure from scratch, Culture Chains are based on existing blockchain frameworks, optimized and refined for cultural economies.

Today, advancements in technology (interestingly, technology has empowered culture in return) have made creating a new chain easier than ever before. Frameworks such as OP Stack, Arbitrum Orbit, Cosmos SDK, along with modular blockchains, Data Availability Layers (DA Layers), and Rollup as a Service (RAAS) solutions mean that you don't need a Ph.D. in distributed systems to launch a new blockchain.

This means that Culture Chains have the technical feasibility today, rather than being a distant future fantasy.

Critics often question the Total Addressable Market (TAM) of Culture Chains, arguing that focusing on niche communities will limit their growth. But when viewed in a larger context, this logic doesn't hold up: BTS has an estimated global fanbase of 90 million, nearly three times higher than Solana's all-time high Monthly Active Users (MAU) of 31 million.

More importantly, fan communities are not merely "existing"; they consume, organize, and take action. They are not passive users but an as yet untapped cultural infrastructure.

Stop fixating on TAM and start measuring TAC (Total Addressable Culture).

4. Beyond Narratives: Real Projects, Real Value

Culture Chains are not just conceptual narratives; they are real-world projects that have already been implemented and attracted users who truly care about them.

Currently, there are some early projects embodying this concept:

Story: An Open Story Universe on the Blockchain

Imagine the next phenomenon in fantasy universes or comic IPs not coming from a single studio but co-created by an entire on-chain community. @StoryProtocol is betting on this idea.

Story is a new L1 project aiming to become the decentralized IP infrastructure of the internet—a collaborative platform where creators can on-chain collaborate to build and remix stories, tracking contributions and ownership via blockchain.

Its technical core is the provenance mechanism of creative works, but the real highlight is at the cultural level. Story seeks to nurture a storytelling community, where creators collaborate to build a worldview and transform fan communities into DAOs.

If Story succeeds, the next \"Harry Potter\"-level cultural phenomenon could be a product of decentralized co-creation—memes, fan creations, and community lore will all intertwine, secured by the blockchain for authenticity and ownership.

Story represents a paradigm shift: it sees the blockchain as a canvas for carrying memes, myths, and collaborative creativity, not just as a cold technology.

Animecoin: The On-Chain Link of Global Anime Culture

The anime culture sphere is vast and borderless, connecting hundreds of millions of people worldwide through their love for Japanese animation. Now, imagine if the entire anime community had a common token to rally around, what would happen? This is precisely what @animecoin ($ANIME) aims to achieve.

As a newly launched \"culture coin,\" Animecoin aims to bring together anime enthusiasts on the blockchain. The idea is straightforward: to transform existing active subcultures into a crypto ecosystem. For a more in-depth analysis, refer to the two reports, \"Anime Needs Web3\" and \"The Future of $ANIME is Yours.\"

Animecoin can be used for:

· Funding fan-driven projects, such as fan creations, independent animations, etc.;

· Purchasing and trading anime-related digital assets, such as NFT art, virtual collectibles;

· Community governance, allowing token holders to vote in support of emerging anime creators.

But more than specific use cases, $ANIME is more like a cultural flag—a way for global anime fans to have a shared economic identity.

Currently in its early stages, but even if only a small fraction of the global otaku population joins, it signifies the birth of millions of new crypto users, who are likely more concerned about Crunchyroll (an anime streaming platform) than encryption technology itself.

Animecoin fully embodies the core concept of a \"cultural chain\": it does not require people to care about encryption for the sake of encryption but rather builds a crypto ecosystem around people's pre-existing beloved identities and cultures.

5. The Fracture of Cultural Economy: When Fans Become Investors

However, the biggest risk of a cultural chain comes from a concerning question: Can fans really become investors?

Consumer culture and investment are fundamentally two very different behaviors. Unless someone is already deeply involved in both crypto and a particular cultural community, it is hard to assume that these two entirely different groups will naturally merge. Perhaps the idea that a "fan community can evolve into an investor community" is fundamentally just an overly optimistic simplification.

Secondly, the more realistic risk is this: when speculative demand overwhelms real cultural participation, the economic system will collapse. This has been validated numerous times in past Play-to-Earn (P2E) games—when the economic drive is no longer based on actual demand but is inflated by hype, a bubble burst is only a matter of time. The cultural chain also faces the same threat: if financial incentives replace cultural identity, the hype will unwittingly hollow out the entire ecosystem.

Lastly, the issue of fragmentation and liquidity islands. If every niche culture carves out its own blockchain, it might recreate the isolation problem that we originally sought to solve with interoperability. To avoid this, cultural chains must have composable infrastructure and bridge the liquidity of the mainstream crypto economy, or they may find themselves trapped in their isolated world.

6. Moat Built by MEME

If you can't rock this hoodie, don't bet on this chain. Despite mentioning some potential risks earlier, I still believe in cultural chains, and the reason is simple: once they take off, the impact is exponential.

In the crypto industry, technological advantages are often fleeting—today's "black tech" will become tomorrow's standard feature. However, the social advantage (social alpha) remains one of the few truly sustainable moats. For investors and builders, leveraging culture is not a shortcut but a strategic "force multiplier."

For VCs and Investors:

When evaluating a cultural chain, don't just look at TPS (transactions per second) and GitHub commit history, but also ask:

· Does this community have a "soul"?

· Are there true believers who will hold on even in a bear market?

It may sound a bit esoteric, but this is actually a crucial early signal that can indicate whether a project can grow organically. A project with average technology but a MEME army may grow faster than a project with top-notch technology but lacking cultural resonance. In other words, investing in a cultural chain is more like investing in a social network: what you should focus on is not the code's efficiency but the community's activity, sense of identity, and network effects.

For Web3 Entrepreneurs:

The cultural chain has given you an opportunity to accurately meet user needs. You are not blindly searching for users in an unknown market but are directly entering a highly matched community that is eager for the product you provide.

However, this also means that you cannot "hide" behind technology—the community's feedback is immediate and very direct. The best approach is to build openly and transparently, allowing the community to participate in the narrative. In addition to technology, consider "urban planning": community governance, social features, event planning, storytelling... In the cultural chain, social experience (social UX) and UI/UX are equally important.

For Speculators, Creators, and Everyday Players:

The cultural chain is a playground that can turn your passion from "niche" to "mainstream." If you have been deeply involved in an ecosystem but feel limited by a general-purpose blockchain, you now have your own stage.

However, at the same time, the responsibility of maintaining the community atmosphere falls on you. In the cultural chain, you are both content and value. If managed properly, you may become the next builder of the early Ethereum community; but if mismanaged, you may be consumed by internal conflicts. Choose your tribe carefully.

7. The Next Cycle Belongs to the "Believers"

From 2010 to the beginning of 2020, competition in the crypto world revolved around TPS (transactions per second) and technological roadmaps. But those days are over. Now, many public chains are already "good enough" at a purely technical level, and the core of the next round of competition will be the cultural density within each block.

In the late 2020s, standout public chains may not necessarily be those theoretically capable of processing millions of TPS but those that can support millions of memes, millions of high-quality interactions, and gather millions of believers.

So, if you are looking for the next wave of crypto trends, don't just ask, "What can the code of this chain do?" Instead, ask, "What does this community believe in?" Look for places with inside jokes, a sense of ritual, and a strong cultural atmosphere because this is the breeding ground of the cultural chain and may also give birth to the next generation of public chains.

Source: "Original Article Link"