The first batch of 00s Web3 workers have already started to "withdraw from the circle."

All kinds of stories of post-00s speculating and getting rich are flooding social media, and there is also a B-side of the story. (Synopsis: ByteDance Engineer to Tens of Million Dollar Crypto Trader: Calm Wealth Cryptography and Trading Philosophy) (Background Supplement: From Zero Leverage to Stable Profit: A Crypto Trader's Six Years of Review Experience and Lessons) At a mid-week meeting, I said unkempt and empty-eyed to the meeting screen (this time I didn't turn on the camera, and they couldn't see my image): "I don't want to work anymore." After I said this, the atmosphere of the meeting froze for two seconds, "Golem, you stay after the meeting", and the editor-in-chief's voice broke the silence. Thankfully, the editor-in-chief was really solving my problem after the meeting, not me. After a few conversations (mainly asking me what I like to do), everyone came to the unanimous conclusion: I need to go out and change the environment. So I went to Guiyang to see the festival, and then stayed in Kunming for a week. Rock lovers from all over the country binge at music festivals Web 3 is no longer the white moonlight in my heart This state of low energy and dazedness is not the first time it has appeared in me, and since 2025, I have felt such emotions pervade my body many times. Many friends are concerned about whether I am at work because of work, after all, it is happy to be a cow and horse without humans. People who say this obviously don't understand Web 3. Our industry should be the industry with the least class flavor - higher than the salary level of peers, the freedom of remote work, flexible working hours, no clock-in system, open and flat management structure, which dividend is placed in today's involuted employment environment is dimensionality reduction to hit peers. If you take 5 years as the generational division of the workplace, today, when the "post-05s" have begun to emerge in the Web 3 workplace, I was born in 02 and I am also the first batch of "post-00s" Web 3 workers. While these workplace benefits remain the same, Web 3 is no longer the white moonlight in my mind. In 2021, I began to contact Web 3 in school, and in 2023, I formally and systematically learned Web 3 industry knowledge and entered the workplace as an intern. In my mind, this industry should be the industry with the most idealists, and I entered Web 3 with a love for blockchain, decentralization, and a "revolutionary" spirit, believing that this industry can transform our world for the better. Data ownership, personal privacy protection, trustless currency, decentralized finance, open and transparent Web 3...... I want to go to the soup for my ideals and the cause in my heart. However, reality tells me that the industry only looks at "money". "My understanding of Web 3 and blockchain may be too idealistic and shallow, I hope to have a deeper understanding in the new year", when my boss asked me about my plans for 2025 at the end of 2024, I put forward such expectations to myself after only half a year of graduation. Journalist is of course a good role to observe and learn Web 3, we input a huge amount of original, first-hand industry information every day, after sorting and processing and output to the market, my original positive understanding of Web 3 is also being reshaped. See what we've been through from 2024 to 2025? No one really cares about the value of technology anymore, no one talks about ideals anymore, and looks desperately at "money". In the first half of 2024, we began to deconstruct VCs and project parties, unlocking low-priced chips to smash the market, using airdrops to create false data disks, and the lying down strategy of "issuing coins is the end", we realized that under the technical narrative packaged by VCs, "money" is the goal; Later, the Meme season broke out, players with ghosts built communities under the banner of decentralization and common ideas, third-rate developers were praised under the support of "AI Agent Saints", celebrities outside the circle were given grand "courtesy", and finally went to the end →of the FOMO → giving up the community / project, "money" is still the goal; At a time when all liquidity is about to be squeezed dry, smart crypto people are looking to the stock market, backdoor listings and building public company treasuries have become a means of finding "new money", and it still doesn't matter what these companies do. As a result, my understanding of Web 3 changed from "this is an industry that can make the world a better place" to "this is just an industry that makes money relatively quickly", and I also looked at "money". While I continue to follow industry developments and research new projects and trends, my personal tweets haven't updated crypto-related content for a long time. Some fans will ask me in private messages why I no longer share projects publicly (thanks for my recognition), and my reason is that apart from speculation, there is no project that makes me sincerely interested, so I lose the desire to share. "Golem, what you need is excitement, even if it's work," the associate editor told me. This sentence reminds me of the time when I officially joined the circle in 2023 to intern in a large factory to write research reports, when I was immersed in the obsession and excitement of Web 3 every day, I would chase the mentor to discuss how the cross-chain bridge realizes the transfer of assets on the two chains, what blockchain ethical issues will be brought about by the monopoly of the L2 sequencer, I will ride a bicycle on the Hangzhou Riverside and ask friends: How should account abstraction be understood in layman's terms? But there is no going back. Some of the materials compiled for learning Web 3 at the beginning of the circle Some people also told me that this is just because the market is not good or you have not made money, the internal contradictions in the bear market will intensify, as long as you survive the bull market, everyone will be happy. Money may be a big factor, but the lack of a sense of gain is the real reason. The first batch of post-00 Web 3 workers have begun to retreat / light circle When social media is full of all kinds of post-00s speculating coins to get rich overnight or Web 3 workplaces to listen to the stories of post-00s calling the shots, some post-00s Web 3 workers have silently withdrawn from the circle. Many of the former partners have moved to other industries. Wang Yue is a post-00s with a similar experience to me, working as an intern at a VC in 2023 and later working in a Web 3 enterprise. At the end of July this year, he chose to leave his job and start a foreign trade business. Wang Yue told me that after leaving, it does not mean that he will no longer pay attention to Web 3 and currency speculation, and he still has to rush when he has the opportunity, but he is no longer as invested as before. "In fact, I am not optimistic about my ability to speculate on coins, and it may be more suitable for me to do practical things in the real industry," was the last thing he said to me. Wang Yue talks about entrepreneurial ideas with foreign trade partners More and more post-00s are beginning to realize that the currency circle is a suitable financial management choice, not a suitable career choice. Peaches is a 00-year graduate student from Zhejiang University who was active in student blockchain organizations and interned in Web 3 projects during her studies, but she became a civil servant in her hometown after graduation. "I'm an experiential person, and I think life is bigger than work, so I only think of Web 3 as a side hustle for financial management," Momoko told me, explaining why she didn't choose full-time Web 3 after graduation. Even some post-00s startup teams are starting to abandon Web 3. "When I joined, the project was planned for Web 3, but for various reasons, it is still a pure Web 2 model," says Xiaoyu, who interned at a Web 3 fund before graduating, and later joined the current entrepreneurial team related to the Japanese two-dimensional community, and this year she just took over as the project's CEO. Once we would have been in the same community...