Tribes

“Tribes” – a cartoon that illustrates the tribal DNA of some of the protocols.

Since its 2009 launch, Bitcoin’s price has tumbled more than 50% six times. This has made many of the faint-hearted to leave, for example since the last bull market in 2022, there has been a 27% decrease in the number of developers.

To cope with this, many of the long-term participants have become tribal around their own protocols.

For example, the Ethereum community were quick to point out Solana’s association with the FTX collapse and question Solana’s ability to scale. Also, individual protocols attract people who have general personality traits or career paths.

While protocols like Arbitrum and Solana attract highly technical optimizers (e.g. ex-Apple, ex-SpaceX type engineers) who are familiar with the relationship between hardware and software, protocols like Ethereum attract those wanting to create a decentralized world of cross-chain interaction.

Chris Burniske, Partner at Placeholder VC, distinguishes the Ethereum community as ‘optimists’ or ‘ideologically motivated’ and the Solana community as ‘pragmatists.’