#链上资产管理 After reading this entrepreneur's reflection, I want to clarify a few things with you.

Many people enter Web3 airdrops and participate in projects because they see the "hotness" in sectors like payments and finance. But hotness ≠ real opportunity; they are two different things. This entrepreneur traveled from Yiwu and Shui Bei all the way to Mexico and found that the "scalable applications" mentioned in reports are actually far from as mature as they seem—more fragmented, relationship-driven usage, and far from forming standardized pathways.

What lessons does this give us for our own efforts? It’s important to learn to distinguish **the gap between actual penetration rate and public hype**. No matter how popular a project is or how active its community, it still needs genuine support behind it. Even in foundational sectors like payments, this is true, and for application-layer projects, the caution should be even greater.

The core issue he mentions is also very worth remembering: **Payments are not "winning by just making a good product," but rather by leveraging banking relationships, licenses, risk control, and long-term resilience**. For project teams, this means—whether a project can go far isn’t judged by how well the whitepaper is written or how hot the community is, but by whether it has a solid compliance foundation, risk management capabilities, and long-term commitments.

**Practical advice**: When evaluating new projects next time, don’t just look at how simple the interaction is or how big the airdrop is. Ask yourself—where are the real users of this project? What are the real application scenarios? Is the underlying infrastructure stable? If the answers are vague, then it’s time to be cautious.

Final note: The essence of "shaving" (getting small gains) is to find real opportunities with the least cost. And the prerequisite for finding real opportunities is to learn how to distinguish between "looks hot" and "really promising."