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.
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.’