Author: Paul Cafiero, head of a16z crypto communication cooperation; Source: a16z crypto; Compiler: Shaw, Golden Finance

For decades, the technology industry has always been able to gain public recognition and praise from the outside world with its endless stream of novel ideas. The abbreviation MVP for "minimum viable product" proposed by the entrepreneurial circle happens to be exactly the same as the abbreviation of New York NBA star Jaylen Brunson.

But in the past decade, especially in recent years, the technology industry has undergone earth-shaking changes: simply having a minimum viable product, a brilliant idea and a top team can no longer impress the outside world. The encryption industry has been the most severely affected, with superimposed regulatory inquiries and a large number of negative projects dominating the headlines. The public's vigilance in screening has been greatly increased. The overwhelming industry noise has made people learn to actively screen information.

When traditional financial (TradFi) institutions began to seriously lay out the encryption track - BlackRock issued a tokenized money market fund, Fidelity submitted an application for a crypto ETF, and JPMorgan Chase used self-developed blockchain to complete transaction settlement - The direction of industry public opinion completely changed. People no longer just talk about what encryption is, but how to get real attention in the industry.

We are now in this new stage. The rules of industry communication have been quietly rewritten, and all practitioners must adapt.

Welcome to the Show Me Era.

What has changed and why now?

In the early days of the development of the encryption industry, the essence of the industry’s communication logic was “picture narrative”: the vision itself was the product. If a project can be launched with only a white paper and tokens, the media and crypto community will take the initiative to pay attention. Everyone is betting on the future potential of the project, not the results that have been implemented now. Now this logic is completely invalid.

At its root, this change in communication logic is caused by the superposition of three factors: First, the market’s decades-long doubts about encryption technology continue to ferment and deepen; second, large-scale traditional financial institutions enter the encryption track on a large scale, no longer just at the conceptual level, but launch real-life products; third, the artificial intelligence industry seems to have become popular overnight, but in fact it has accumulated for decades, and now mature products are launched in batches for ordinary consumers.

Large institutions no longer just wait and see the industry, or confine related business within the innovation department, but are fully committed to large-scale implementation: BlackRock CEO Larry Fink fully embraces the tokenization track, Fidelity builds a full set of custody and ETF infrastructure, JPMorgan Chase launches the Onyx blockchain network, and Franklin Templeton launches on-chain money market funds.

These are no longer water-testing experiments, but mature products, supported by a complete traditional financial compliance framework, institutional customer groups and strong balance sheets.

The large-scale entry of traditional finance has raised the standard for judging "formal and credible projects" in the encryption industry. When the world's largest asset management companies are tokenizing government bonds, the media, partners, and the market have naturally increased their requirements for high-quality project performance proof.

From a policy perspective, the industry has also officially entered the mainstream. The GENIUS Act was successfully passed last year, and now the CLARITY Act, which fully regulates the market structure, is about to be submitted to the Senate for a vote. The caliber of external communication for subsequent projects will also be further adjusted. If the CLARITY Act is implemented, founders will be able to disclose project construction content in more detail and specificity, which was completely unachievable in the past.

Whether the industry is ready or not, the crypto industry is maturing.

This directly reshaped the industry communication environment: the outside world no longer asked "What are you doing" when they first came up. Instead, the question was: "What have you implemented? Who is actually using it?"

At the practical level, simple and moving story narratives can no longer move the market, and the market needs solid proof.

New performance certification system

The promotional rhetoric that worked in the past - "We build product Y for group

What does a complete performance certification system include?

• A cooperative relationship with substantial practical value, not just at the negotiation stage. There must be real technology integration, deployed on-chain contracts, and the partner is willing to publicly endorse the reasons for choosing you. In the past, a cooperation announcement could be regarded as a substitute for project development progress. Now, only the cooperation itself can prove business growth to be convincing. In other words, a leading organization, protocol or platform has chosen you among many competing products, and you can clearly explain the reasons behind it.

• Disclosure of detailed and hard-core data. Publish the real transaction volume of the main network (not just the test network data), active wallet addresses, revenue, and user retention curve. Don’t just say “rapid growth” in general, give specific percentages, time periods, and benchmarks. The professionalism of industry reporters continues to improve, and they will verify the data themselves through on-chain data analysis platforms such as Dune and CoinMarketCap; if the data cannot withstand on-chain verification, the project narrative will also lose credibility.

• True product-market fit signals. Identify the product user groups and the core reasons for continued retention of users (including customers from other industries).

I think the most powerful evidence to verify product matching is not the online press conference, but the native community that was spontaneously formed and continued to expand before the public relations campaign was launched.

If the most loyal users of a project are all investors and currency-holding stakeholders, it is a risk warning signal - there are financial incentives for such users; but if users actively find the project by word of mouth, this is high-quality material worthy of publicity.

All effective evidence comes from external endorsements formed spontaneously before public relations: third-party agency cooperation, security audits, and independent industry research. The most convincing proof is never that the project party directs and performs on its own, but that a third party takes the initiative to recognize the value of the project to the market.

Inspiration for start-up project communication work

In the early stages of a project, when the product is not yet mature but the vision is very clear, it is easy for the team to choose grand vision and declarative content as the main line of promotion. This approach is sincere in its original intention and there is nothing inherently wrong with it.

But in the current market environment, it will only make the outside world think that the project risk is high.

A more reliable communication idea is to plan the narrative sequence around the implemented results. Prioritize the data you are most confident about, even if the scale is small: a thousand daily active users who do not know the founding team at all is far more convincing than tens of millions of strategic investments; an agreement with a transaction volume of 50 million US dollars in 90 days is far better than the empty talk of "huge transaction volume will be generated after scale in the future."

At the same time, external publicity statements must be precise and restrained. "We build the future of the payment industry" is just a vision, not a proof of performance; "We have shortened the cross-border settlement time from 3 days to 4 minutes, and three companies are currently using it commercially" is the real proof of the vision.

For founders who have a full-time communication team and are personally responsible for speaking out to the outside world, the core logic of practical operation is: narratives are generated based on facts, rather than forcibly packaging facts with narratives. This kind of content creation has a higher threshold and tests rigor, but only this kind of content can really impress the market, especially now.

Long-term development perspective

The above does not mean that vision is no longer important. The communication of mature encryption projects is always two-pronged: displaying existing implementation results while explaining the greater long-term value behind the product. The core difference lies in the narrative sequence and content proportion.

As for proportion, in 2021 the industry can still accept a publicity ratio of 80% vision and 20% implementation results; now this ratio has been completely reversed.

You can still publish white papers and industry manifestos, but these alone are far from enough. The vision still has value - it makes the implementation data more in-depth and provides the media and analysts with a long-term interpretation perspective. However, the grand vision must be supported by solid implementation results in order to gain market recognition.

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The era of "seeing is believing" is not a short-term correction in the industry. The professionalism of the crypto industry audience (media, institutions, ordinary retail investors) continues to increase, and the judging standards will be permanently raised.

High-quality builders in the industry have long realized that this change is actually beneficial to projects that are working hard. If you have real business growth, complete data, and heavyweight implementation partners, higher industry thresholds will automatically filter out market noise and make your project advantages stand out.

The key question is: Is your communication strategy used to demonstrate actual results, or is it still just a description of future promises?