On August 15, when SEI/Cyber ​​was officially launched on Binance, the coin community wailed everywhere, with many people claiming that they had been PUA/anti-PUA, and then quickly reached a consensus: "Domestic projects only know how to PUA and have no pattern. Coins should still focus on projects with foreign teams and high financing."

Some bizarre "rumors" also spread: the founder of SEI is actually the younger brother of Pinduoduo founder Huang Zheng. SEI staff told TechFlow that this was pure rumor, and the SEI founding team were all Americans. After verification, it was found that this originated from the community's ridicule of SEI, "the progress always stays at 99%", and then it was spread by word of mouth.

The people who have been hit hardest are the professional hair salon workers. Many people have exclaimed on Twitter that "hair salon studios are about to face a wave of closures." This is indeed the case. We have found that many small and medium-sized hair salon studios have already gone into shutdown and suspended.

Jin Lian made his fortune by relying on the airdrops of dydx\ens\arb, and then set up a Mao Mao studio in a second-tier city, hiring relatives and college students to do Mao Mao full-time. Two months ago, he closed the studio, and Sui became their last song. "I have been investing, but I haven't seen any returns," Jin Lian said. Most small and medium-sized studios are "living on Mao Mao". They had too high expectations before, which led to blind expansion of the number of people and addresses, and they fired the bullet (Gas) in advance. In addition, there are no new big Mao Maos, the project party's PUA is getting more and more fierce, and there is no wealth effect in the market. Mao Mao studios are no longer sustainable.

What made Jin Lian not want to invest anymore was that the hair was getting more and more curly, and their small job could not compare with that of a big studio.

In June this year, a team held an offline Zksync event in Shenzhen. More than one hundred people came to the event. They collectively held hundreds of thousands of addresses, and the number is still growing.

In Jin Lian's opinion, the era of LuMao studios has passed and they have begun to move towards formal group operations. In the future, only large studios will have room for survival.

A mature hair-pulling studio should have:

(1) Infrastructure: such as secure fingerprint browser; IP pool; own KYC...

(2) Loyal and obedient employees, including scientists;

(3) The money can be kept for 2 years, or the services of taking advantage of others or buying new shares can be provided to make money in advance and transfer the risk to retail investors.

"The project owners have also become smarter. They know that most of the addresses are scammers who take the money and run away, so they will also think of ways to counter it." Under this game, scamming is shifting from "low cost and high return" to "high cost and low return", or even "high cost and negative return".

The one who gets fleeced may not be the project party, but may also be the studio itself.

Today, the competition among Layer2 players represents opportunities on the one hand, but also hides dangers on the other.

Currently, all Layer2s on the market have a centralized aspect. Transactions are packaged and uploaded to the chain through a sequencer. The Gas fees paid by users actually include two parts: one is the real Gas, and the other is the handling fee. A large part of it is the handling fee, which flows into the pockets of the project party.

Inspired by the myth of OP/ARB, a large number of people and funds have poured into the industry. They are frantically looking for new public chains and Layer2 that have not yet issued coins. Among them, Layer2 is the absolute main force of interaction. Hundreds of thousands or even millions of addresses are generated, and massive amounts of ETH enter into it for "meaningless" interactions.

The L2s were all grinning. ZkSync Era made a fortune by operating a centralized sequencer and earning transaction fees, and the wool studio became their source of profit.

In addition, the multi-chain profiteering has also made "cross-chain bridges" a necessity, especially Orbiter Finance, which focuses on L2 low-fee cross-chain, has become the biggest winner. By collecting "bridge fees", it earns millions of dollars every month, of which more than 90% is contributed by the wool party.

The emergence of OP Stack and the "one-click issuance of L2" have made the L2 war even more intense. Both exchanges and project parties are launching their own L2, including Coinbase, Bybit, Frax, Gitcoin, DeBank... It is foreseeable that there will be more L2 in the future.

The first thing they attract is the "wool studio". Even though they know that they may be the project party's profit, for the sake of that beautiful dream, many studios will still continue to come forward and take a gamble, which deeply interprets the true meaning of PUA.

No matter what, the projects that issue coins and earn transaction fees are the biggest winners in this game of making money.