Why the next big blockchain might not be about tech at all, but about tribe and meme magic.

*Special thanks to @Zagabond, @brianjhhong, @Steve_4P, @JayLovesPotato, @100y_eth for their valuable feedback on this piece.

Imagine a blockchain where the killer feature isn’t a breakthrough consensus algorithm or eye-popping tps – it’s the vibe. On this chain, people show up not for lower gas fees, but for the inside jokes, the shared identity, and the memes. Sounds absurd, right? Yet, time and again in crypto, we’ve seen culture trump technology.

Think about it: $DOGE (and a dozen others), a literal joke, birthed as a meme, somehow rocketed into a multi-billion dollar asset without any tech innovation. Bitcoin’s earliest days were fueled less by its code and more by a cyberpunk creed. Ethereum’s most die-hard users often say they “came for the tech, stayed for the community.” Hackathons like ETHGlobal and global Devcon events were cultural touchstones, forging bonds among developers beyond the code. Crypto has evolved into a stage where participation is the product – an immersive social game of finance, ideology, and culture.

Welcome to the era of Culture Chains: blockchains defined not by what they do, but by who they are for.

1. Culture Is the Product

Culture Chains are the new vertical SaaS for fandoms.

In plain English, a culture chain is a blockchain with an ethos – a network tailored to a specific community, subculture, or movement. Unlike generic “one-size-fits-all” L1s or hyper-focused appchains that run a single dapp, culture chains occupy a spicy middle ground. They’re purpose-built playgrounds for people who share a common vibe or goal, offering a home for multiple applications that all resonate with a particular tribe.

By this definition, one might argue that every blockchain has culture. Ethereum has a cypherpunk-meets-institutional ethos, prioritizing decentralization, programmability, and neutrality. Solana, by contrast, embodies speed, chaos, and financial speculation, shaped largely by its high throughput, low cost architecture.

Yet, these cultural identities emerged as byproducts of design choices rather than deliberate intent. General-purpose blockchains inevitably develop their own unique cultures, but Culture Chains are different in that they are purpose-built to serve cultural economies from the protocol level. The distinction lies in intentionality.

Picture a blockchain where every dapp on it caters to anime art collectors, or hardcore degens, or RPG gamers, or fans of a particular NFT universe. All the users speak the same slang, ape into the same trends, laugh at the same memes. It’s like a digital city-state with its own culture, running on a blockchain. While a typical general-purpose chain is like a giant cosmopolitan metropolis (great diversity but often chaotic), a culture chain is more like a theme park or a renaissance fair – highly curated for a specific crowd. By focusing on a niche, it can optimize everything (technology, governance, tokenomics) to serve that community’s values and needs.

They’re blockchains designed to monetize, scale, and protect it. That design can take many forms:

• Infrastructure optimized for specific creator or media flows
• Built-in revenue-sharing or tokenized royalty mechanisms
• Governance models adapted to creative communities
• Embedded incentives for fan participation, funding, and discovery

In essence, culture chains are an evolution of the “vertical blockchain” idea: instead of boiling the ocean, they own a niche. They aim to be the go-to chain for X, where X is a community or use-case that’s culturally cohesive. The hypothesis is that by doing so, they can nurture stronger network effects among like-minded users and devs than a generic chain ever could. Their power comes from focus.

2. You Can Fork Code, But You Can’t Fork Vibes

In crypto, tribes > tech. Bet on the chain with the most believers per block, not just the most tps.

Does culture really matter more than code? Many hardcore technologists roll their eyes at this notion. After all, blockchain infrastructure is serious business – math, cryptography, engineering, game theory. But while code is law, in crypto culture is king. The social layer decides which laws (code) get adopted in the first place. A brilliant protocol with no believers is DOA; a scrappy meme with an army of zealots can move mountains.

Crypto networks are ultimately social networks with a bank attached. Human psychology drives adoption: FOMO, tribalism, identity, belief. You can’t fork that with a Github repo. Consider how Bitcoin forked into Bitcoin Cash – the tech diverged slightly, but the culture diverged massively (big blockers vs. small blockers), and that social schism determined the winner. Ethereum’s community famously forked out Ethereum Classic; same code lineage, different culture, hugely different outcomes.

Memes and narratives have atomic-level power in this industry. Remember the DeFi summer when yield farming took off? It wasn’t just the smart contracts; it was the memetic rallying cry of degens shouting farm and dump and aping together that created a movement. Or the NFT boom: why did JPEGs on Ethereum explode in value? Not because ERC-721 is magical tech (it’s fairly simple), but because a culture of digital art collectors and flexers coalesced around CryptoPunks, Bored Apes, and the rest. The tech enabled provable ownership, sure, but the social prestige and community belonging drove the hype.

A chain’s long-term success often boils down to community moats. This is the contrarian truth: the strongest moat in crypto isn’t hash power or tps, it’s belief. Value isn’t just in the code, it’s in the culture that forms around it.

It’s the unquantifiable mojo that makes a person tattoo the logo on their arm or hodl through a 90% drawdown. It turns early adopters into evangelists. It makes a product feel inevitable.

Culture chains double down on this insight, betting that a passionate niche can outperform a generic mass.

3. Stop Chasing TAM. Start With a Tribe

General-purpose chains pray for users. Culture Chains start with it baked in.

Yet, the important question remains: how feasible is this shift? A new category of blockchains can only succeed if it is both technologically viable and economically scalable.

Unlike past blockchain narratives that attempted to reshape entire industries from the ground up, Culture Chains take a more pragmatic approach. They do not require entirely new infrastructure but instead refine and optimize existing blockchain frameworks to serve cultural economies.

Thanks to new tech stacks (ironically, tech enabling culture), spinning up your own blockchain is easier than ever. Frameworks like the OP Stack, Arbitrum Orbit and Cosmos SDK, plus modular blockchains, DA layers, and rollup-as-a-service offerings, mean you no longer need a PhD in distributed systems to launch a new chain.

This makes Culture Chains technically viable today, not in some hypothetical future.

Critics often raise the TAM issue: that by focusing on niche audiences, these chains cap their growth. But that logic doesn’t hold when you zoom in: BTS’s fandom is estimated at 90M people, dwarfing Solana’s all-time high MAU of 31M.

And importantly, fandoms don’t just exist. They spend, organize, and mobilize. They’re not passive consumers, they’re cultural infrastructure waiting to be activated.

Forget TAM. Start measuring TAC(Total Addressable Culture).

4. Not Just Lore: Real Projects, Real Payoffs

Culture Chains aren’t vapor. They’re shipping, with users who actually care.

Several early players are already building with this ethos.

Story

What if the next great fantasy universe or comic franchise didn’t come from a single studio, but from a community on-chain? @StoryProtocol is betting on exactly that. It’s a new L1 project aiming to be the decentralized IP backbone for the internet – basically, an open platform where creators can collaboratively build and remix stories, with the blockchain tracking contributions and ownership.

The tech here is interesting (provenance tracking for creative works), but the big idea is cultural. It’s trying to cultivate a tribe of storytellers who collectively craft worlds – a fandom turned DAO.

If it succeeds, the next Harry Potter-like phenomenon could be crowd-created, with memes and fan lore intertwined, all secured on a blockchain. Story illustrates the shift toward cultural innovation: it treats a blockchain like a canvas for memes, myths, and collaborative creativity

Animecoin

Anime fandom is massive and borderless – a billion of people passionately connected by their love of Japanese animation. Now imagine giving that entire global tribe a token to rally around. Enter @animecoin, a.k.a. $ANIME. Recently launched as a “culture coin,” Animecoin is designed to unite anime lovers on the blockchain. The idea is straightforward: leverage an existing vibrant subculture into a crypto ecosystem. For a more detailed analysis, refer to the reports ‘Anime Needs Web3’ and ‘The Future of $ANIME is Yours’.

Animecoin could be used to fund fan-driven projects, buy and trade anime-themed digital goods, or vote on supporting up-and-coming creators. But more than any specific utility, $ANIME serves as a cultural banner – a shared economic identity for anime geeks.

It’s early days, but if even a fraction of global otakus embrace it, that’s millions of new crypto users who care more about Crunchyroll than cryptography. Animecoin exemplifies the “culture chain” thesis: it’s crypto built around an identity people love, rather than asking people to care about crypto for its own sake.

Abstract

@AbstractChain takes a more crypto-native route. Instead of layering onto an existing fandom, it’s creating a new kind of cultural economy from scratch. It’s a new network on top of Ethereum that doesn’t sell itself on being the fastest or most secure (though it uses fancy tech like ZK-rollups under the hood). Instead, Abstract’s pitch is about making crypto fun and easy so normal people actually want to use it. Backed by the team behind the beloved Pudgy Penguins NFT collection, Abstract is tailored for games, collectibles, social apps – blockchain applications where community and user experience matter most. For a more detailed analysis, refer to the reports ‘Abstract: A Blueprint For Disneyland In Crypto’ and ‘The Masterminds Behind Abstract: Igniting the Crypto Consumer Revolution’.

Abstract is basically saying: if you build the cultural playground, the geeks and normies will come. It’s an experiment in baking community values (accessibility, fun, creative freedom) right into the blockchain infrastructure.

What unites these examples is a strategy of owning a vertical. Instead of being everything for everyone, these chains want to be everything for someone. By concentrating on a tribe, they hope to ignite powerful network effects: users stick around because their friends are there and the whole environment is tailor-made for them; developers deploy there because that’s where their target users congregate.

It’s positive feedback: a flywheel of culture > users > apps > more culture.

5. Where the Vibes Break

When fandoms turn financial, the culture can crack.

That said, the biggest flaw in this thesis lies in one uncomfortable question: can fans truly become investors? The act of consuming culture and the act of investing are fundamentally different. Unless someone happens to be deeply engaged in both crypto and a specific fan culture from the start, it’s hard to assume these two very different audiences will naturally converge. Perhaps the idea that fandoms can evolve into investor communities is, at best, an optimistic oversimplification.

The second risk is just as critical, and familiar. When speculative demand overwhelms organic engagement, the underlying economy collapses. We’ve seen this story unfold time and again in numerous p2e games. The same danger looms here. If financial incentives begin to outweigh cultural participation, speculation could quietly erode fan economies from the inside out.

Finally, fragmentation and liquidity silos. If every niche spins out its own chain, we risk recreating the same isolation problem we tried to solve with interoperability. To succeed, Culture Chains will need composable infrastructure and bridge liquidity to the broader crypto economy.

6. Moats Made of Memes

If you wouldn’t wear the hoodie, don’t bet the chain

So, why am I still bullish on culture chains despite those cautionary tales? Because when they do hit, they hit big. In a landscape where technological alpha gets arbitraged away quickly (today’s flashy scalability trick is tomorrow’s baseline feature), social alpha – the unique energy of a community remains one of the last unfair advantages. As an investor or builder, leveraging culture is a power move.

For VCs and funders: evaluating a culture chain means expanding your due diligence beyond TPS and GitHub commits. Ask: Does this community have a soul? Is there a core of true believers who will stick around in the trenches? It sounds squishy, but these are leading indicators of whether a project can grow organically. A chain with mediocre tech but an army of memelords might outgrow a chain with brilliant tech and no vibe. The investment thesis here is like backing a social network – you’re looking at engagement, identity, network effects, not just software throughput.

For crypto-native builders and founders: culture chains offer a chance to build with maximal user alignment. You’re not launching into the void hoping to attract random users; you have a preset audience hungry for what you’re building. It’s like being a chef in a region that loves your kind of food. But it also means you can’t hide – the feedback loop will be instant and vocal. Build in the open with your community, let them own the narrative with you. And remember, prioritize not just tech, but also urban planning (community governance, social features, fun events, lore). The social UX is as important as the UI/UX.

For the degens, the creators, the everyday participants: culture chains are the ultimate sandbox. They’re places where your obsession is the norm, not the niche. If you’re deep into an ecosystem and feel held back by the general-purpose chains, you now have an avenue to collectively roll your own playground. Of course, with great power comes great responsibility – it’s on the community to keep the vibe alive. In a culture chain, you are the content and the value. That can be incredibly rewarding (think early Ethereum folks who literally helped shape a world) or exhausting if mismanaged. Choose your tribes wisely.

7. The Next Cycle Belongs to the Cults

In the 2010~early 2020s, crypto was all about “moar TPS” and one-upping each other with technical roadmaps. Those days are gone. We’ve reached a point where many chains are “good enough” on pure tech. The next frontier of competition is vibe density per block. The chains that will stand out in the late 2020s won’t necessarily be the ones processing a million TPS in theory; they’ll be the ones hosting a million inside jokes, a million passionate interactions, a million-strong collective that feels like home.

So if you’re hunting for the next big crypto trend, don’t just ask “What does the code do?” Ask “What does the community believe?” Look for the in-jokes, the rituals, the vibe. That’s where you’ll find culture chains being born – and with them, perhaps the next generation of blockchains.

(Halfway through writing this article, I realized that defining Culture Chains isn’t as straightforward as I initially thought. The cleanest definition I have right now is simply blockchains purpose-built for specific cultural industries and their fandoms. Maybe I’ll refine it further as I develop my thesis).

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