From the lens of 7 years in this industry, you learn to see the market not as a single entity, but as a star system governed by two opposing, yet codependent, gravitational forces. There is the slow, immense gravity of the Builder, and there is the explosive, brilliant velocity of the Meme.
Every project, every price chart, and every founder’s decision is a product of the constant war between these two forces. One pulls toward long-term, compounding value. The other rockets toward short-term, exponential attention. Understanding which force is in control is the first principle of navigating the cycles without losing your mind or your capital.
The Force of Gravity: The Builder’s Creed
Gravity is the unglamorous, patient force of long-termism. It is the daily work of ecosystem building: shipping code, writing documentation, fostering a community, and grinding through bear markets when the price is irrelevant and the tourists have all gone home.
The Builder’s creed is one of “perfect is the enemy of good, but done is better than perfect.” This isn’t an excuse for sloppy work; it’s a strategy for survival. You ship a minimum viable product to establish a foothold, to create the first kernel of mass around which a community can form. Consensus here is not a fleeting social agreement; it is a deep, technical, and social belief in a project’s long-term mission, forged over years of consistent delivery.
For the true builder, the price is a lagging indicator. It is a noisy, often irrational signal that eventually, over a long enough time horizon, catches up to the fundamental value being created. The goal is not to capture today’s liquidity, but to build something so essential that it will capture the world’s liquidity a decade from now.
The Force of Velocity: The Meme’s Gambit
Velocity is the intoxicating, chaotic force of the short-term. It is the world of meme culture, narrative warfare, and 24/7 attention markets. Its only objective is to achieve escape velocity from the background noise and become the center of the conversation, right now.
The playbook of velocity is entirely different. It thrives on imperfection, on viral slogans, and on the raw, untamed power of social consensus. Here, consensus is not about long-term belief; it’s about the lightning-in-a-bottle moment when thousands of people agree, simultaneously, that “this is the thing.” Price is not a lagging indicator; price is the signal. A rising price is proof that the meme is working, which in turn attracts more attention, creating a reflexive loop of pure velocity.
This is the domain of the exiter. In a system governed by velocity, the exit is a natural and expected part of the game. The goal is to ride the wave of acceleration and disembark before it inevitably crashes back to earth. There is no pretense of long-term value; there is only the honest pursuit of short-term alpha.
The Collision: Where Cycles Are Born
The crypto market is the chaotic arena where these two forces collide. The most successful projects are not those that choose one force over the other, but those that learn to harness both.
A Builder uses Velocity: A technically brilliant team launches a token with a clever meme, using the short-term speculative energy to bootstrap a community and fund long-term development. The initial velocity serves the ultimate goal of building gravity.A Meme builds Gravity: A project that starts as a pure meme (like Dogecoin or Shiba Inu) survives its initial hype cycle. A core community of believers sticks around and begins to build an actual ecosystem, slowly transforming pure velocity into a small but stable center of gravity.
The “exiters” play a crucial role in this system. Their selling pressure is the ultimate test of a project’s gravity. When the short-term players cash out, is there a core of long-term believers and a valuable underlying product left to hold the line? If so, the project survives, stronger and more battle-tested. If not, it returns to the dust from which it came.
Surviving the System
After seven years, you stop seeing these forces as “good” or “bad.” They simply are. They are the physics of our industry. The bear market is the long reign of gravity, where only the projects with real mass survive. The bull market is the explosive triumph of velocity, where everything seems to fly.
The key to survival is to be intellectually honest about which game you are playing. Are you a builder, patiently compounding your efforts to create gravity? Or are you a trader, skillfully surfing the waves of velocity? The danger lies in confusing the two — in believing a short-term meme has long-term gravity, or in expecting a long-term project to provide short-term escape velocity.
Understand the forces at play. Know your own strategy. And respect the raw, unforgiving power of both.
The Two Gravitational Forces of Crypto: A First-Principles Guide to Surviving the Cycles was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.