Million sales of "Escape from Duckov" become a rebellious example, revealing the true on-chain scarcity of the "collaborative impulse"

When the world was still young, shared beliefs ignited a global blaze. Back then, Bitcoin was a poem, decentralization was a revolution. Today, the glow of Web3 is being gradually swallowed by institutional rationality, regulatory order, and capital prudence. The dreamers and meme creators have gradually stepped back, leaving behind silence after the noise. A question is becoming sharper: when the hype dies, what is left of Web3?

From celebration to cold silence: the collapse of creativity

In Web3’s golden age, creativity was the currency of the world. From DeFi Summer to the NFT craze, from Meme wars to the brief spring of GameFi, anyone could stir up a storm with inspiration, passion, and a little courage. The crypto scene at that time resembled 20th-century internet utopia—chaotic, savage, yet vibrant. People stayed up late coding for community consensus, drove up prices for a cat Meme. Every new concept—DAO, DePIN, SocialFi, Restaking—spread like sparks, igniting the fantasies of dreamers.

However, in autumn 2025, Web3’s creativity seemed to hit a collective standstill. Incidents like the Solana conference controversy, the rise of CTO Meme, and the Facaster acquisition dispute, once enough to ignite the entire internet, now can’t even trend on Twitter. The “hype vitality” in crypto is drying up; people are exhausted, cautious, even beginning to feel “cold.” Bitcoin hits new highs, yet the market still feels hollow. Narratives are being outdated, consensus consumed. The ideal of decentralization is packaged into financial products, innovation becomes an institutional KPI, romance gives way to annualized returns.

This “collapse of creativity” is no accident. As Messari pointed out in “Crypto Thesis 2025,” the industry’s greatest risk isn’t regulation but narrative fatigue. When all concepts can be pre-priced by capital and algorithms, hype loses its meaning. An industry that only talks about valuation and not imagination has essentially detached from culture—and perhaps the death of Web3 begins right here.

Duck Market: an unexpected rebellious example

Just when everything seemed dull, an unrelated “little thing” ignited the internet. In mid-October, a small game called “Escape from Duckov” suddenly topped Steam’s charts. Developed by a five-person team “Carbonate Squad,” incubated by Bilibili, priced at 58 yuan (51 yuan after discount), it sold over a million copies in its first week. No tokens, no on-chain assets, no funding—only word-of-mouth among players drove its viral spread. Even more surprisingly, it spontaneously formed an economic system—players created “Duck Market” through modding and community trading, even leading to a “double-spending” phenomenon. A pure game unexpectedly simulated a decentralized economic model.

The popularity of “Duckov” is a satire of Web3: it’s not that the Duck Market needs to go on-chain, but that the chain needs the Duck Market. When countless GameFi projects raise tens of millions of dollars, desperately designing tokenomics but die from player churn, a “no-token game” has become the purest economic experiment. Players aren’t in it for profit but for fun and sharing; they don’t rely on incentives but maintain order through passion. This precisely reveals the most precious part of Web3—the impulse to collaborate and the desire to create.

From a crypto perspective, the Duck Market is an untapped “ideal vessel”; from an anthropological view, it reminds us that games are humanity’s most primitive consensus tool. Humanity evolved through cooperation, not incentives. When a game can enable tens of thousands to form real trading relationships in a virtual world, its “decentralization” is more natural and moving than most on-chain protocols. The Duck Market reaffirms that blockchain should not pursue “regulatable economic order,” but return to “perceptible human experience.”

Era of rentiers: the dislocation of culture and capital

Web3 was supposed to break centralized structures, but it has become a new hierarchy itself. Veblen wrote in “The Theory of the Leisure Class”: “Conspicuous consumption is a proof of status.” Today, this phrase is once again validated in the blockchain world. Fat penguins, Moonbirds, BAYC… each NFT project once claimed “cultural consensus,” but ultimately became tools for speculation and status. NFTs no longer symbolize creation but symbolize class. On-chain asset displays have become a new form of “virtual luxury goods.” Those who truly create memes, design art, or write code are excluded from the rentier system, becoming the proletariat on the chain.

This is not an isolated case but a structural outcome. Early entrants gained huge wealth through arbitrage and institutional advantages, consolidating power via DAO voting, foundation allocations, and social influence; new users act as “liquidity providers” within layered financial designs. Web3 replaced the old order but replicated its structure. Culturally, hype became a new form of showing off. Memes shifted from humor to marketing; communities from consensus to private domains; DeFi from innovation to yield farms. Every idea is commercialized, metricized, KPI’d. The romance of Web3 has become material for institutions. We thought we were creating the future, but in fact, we are accelerating a “high-frequency nihilism.” As sociologist Han Bingzhe said: “When everything is dominated by productivity, even leisure becomes a competition.” Web3 provides unprecedented tools but strips away spontaneous creativity.

Return to romance: leaving a pure land for the void

At the end of the noise in the crypto world, perhaps we still need a touch of romantic residuals. The Duck Market tells us that human creativity has not disappeared; it has only been buried under overly financialized systems. True decentralization is not power redistribution but the monopolization of imagination. When words like regulation, government bonds, Layer2, and yields dominate the narrative, we need someone on the other end to guard the spark of “hype”—those useless, profitless, yet smile-inducing ideas. The next revival of Web3 may not come from a foundation’s announcement but from a group of anonymous creators, gamers, and community posters. They don’t care about funding amounts; they care whether “fun” is still allowed.

Pearls buried in the earth hide their brilliance; once unearthed, they shine brilliantly. The true meaning of decentralization is never about rebellion against authority but about stubbornness in refusing to be controlled by algorithms. When we hand blockchain back to those still willing to “hype,” perhaps the soul of Web3 can shine again. Because only when creation becomes more important than returns will faith remain silent. **$CREO **$CRO **$CRV **