The value logic divergence between Eastern and Western Crypto KOLs

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 continue to decline.”

I might have a little say in this matter.

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

Once you engage, 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 really look at projects like a business;

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

This leads to completely opposite definitions of “key opinion” (KOL) in the East and West.

The logic in the East is clearly about deconstructing everything. I may not be the most talented, but I am probably 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 using technology and models. (Teacher Nie Xiao said it well: those who betray me get 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 the details of these stories can't be scrutinized, it doesn't matter. Even if those stories can't be deeply examined, it doesn't matter. Don't talk about things that are not conducive to unity.

Because they know the true core of this narrative logic is to first craft a story to lure key capital into the game — then use the “Infinite Funding Technique” 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, 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 flows in this industry are basically in the Eastern camp: CEX, payments, DEX (Pancake, Raydium), aggregators (Jupiter)…

On one hand, this is due to capital costs (North American institutions have near-zero financing costs because of state-mandated pension funds and passive investors).

But more importantly, the social environment in Europe and America is still too privileged. Easterners have witnessed that the best narratives and the most powerful products often end up with a thousand “unnatural death” methods. Our social and cultural deconstruction is naturally more PVP.

Of course, they are now also aligning with the East, and the next generation is heading down the same path.

So I slightly disagree with the “decline” theory — the East is just different, and it’s a fundamentally opposite kind of difference.

Only ideas that can cause a fundamental ideological impact on others are truly successful in opinion leadership.

So does this mean that for Eastern KOLs to challenge Western narratives that are “less scrutinizable” and replace them with our own “value logic” is the real success?

“If they can't be more like them, then let them try to prove they understand us better in their panic.”