Calm thinking: How can project parties find a suitable "ecological niche"?

Author: Haotian

What should a good project "niche" look like? After a deep chat with some bosses recently, I found that most projects have not found their own niche:

1. The technical threshold is high, but there must be deep application scenarios. For example, ZK zero-knowledge proof can be used for zkVM, cross-chain bridges, and verifiable computing, but considering the comprehensive cost and efficiency, only zk-Rollup layer2 expansion has been successful. If there are no deep application scenarios in other directions, no matter how good the technology is, it is still a castle in the air.

Mind Network's FHE technology seems to have a high threshold, but in fact it has never found an application scenario. Most of the projects that do ZK coprocessors also have this problem;

2. Market demand must be down-to-earth, not driven by assumptions. Some projects often assume that if 1% of users use our products, the business imagination space will be huge, but in fact, even this 1% of demand may be fake.

Huma is doing PayFi to cut into accounts receivable and cross-border payments, which is reliable based on the compliance background. But for those projects that claim to be "decentralized Stripe", what's wrong with traditional payment? ;

3. The business model must be able to ferry between 2B and 2C. Pure 2C enjoys Fomo dividends, but cannot survive the cold winter; pure 2B makes retail investors feel uninvolved, and marketing costs remain high. The smartest way is to have both sides, with institutions paying and retail investors buying in, so as to cross the cycle.

Backpack wallet + exchange + NFT community, both institutional and retail investors are taken care of. Particle's chain abstraction + application products also take into account 2B2C. In contrast, those projects that are purely infra, and they want to do the full chain DA layer at any time, can only rely on institutional transfusions;

4. The business vision only needs to be "unfalsifiable", don't be greedy for big and complete. What is unfalsifiable? You can't prove that I am wrong in the short term. Some layer2 projects always say "it only takes a wave of mass adoption to explode", and this grand vision that cannot be verified in the short term is equal to no prospect.

KaitoAI may not be an AI company at all, but it has hit the business gap of the attention economy of KOLs and project parties, and it has unfalsifiable properties. Don't always "redefine XXX";

5. Timing is very important. The intersection of the three variables of technology maturity, market education, and competitive landscape is the time window. Why is AI Agent so popular now? LLM is enough, TEE is mature, and user acceptance has risen. Three years ago, talking about AI subverting everything was pure chicken soup.

Amid the Solana MEME craze, there are still projects doing GameFi, hoping to rely on sector rotation to favor themselves. Think about the trading logic behind MEME, and you will know why games, which are slow to land and have long cycles, cannot be in the spotlight;

6. The ecosystem must have self-growth attributes and cannot always be driven by operations. Airdrops to attract users and Grants to subsidize developers are just starting means. The real network effect is that the more users, the greater the value, and the more developers, the stronger the ecosystem.

Those layer2s that rely on points wars to maintain popularity, from zkSync, Scroll to Linea, where are the real users after losing the money-grabbing party?