context collapse in crypto

context collapse is when audiences that were meant to be separate end up in the same place, seeing the same content.

crypto is experiencing massive context collapse. and it's changing everything about how we communicate.

the old context

in the early days, crypto communities were insular. you had:

• bitcoiners talking to bitcoiners
• defi people in defi discord
• nft people in nft spaces
• degens in degen telegram

each context had its own language, its own references, its own assumptions. you could say "probably nothing" and everyone knew what you meant.

what happened

several things collapsed the contexts:

price action — bull runs bring normies. normies bring attention. attention brings more normies.

mainstream coverage — media needs to explain crypto to general audiences. context gets stripped.

platform homogenization — everyone's on twitter now. threads merge. audiences overlap.

memecoin accessibility — when anyone can launch and buy, the barriers disappear.

now a degen, a tradfi analyst, a normie retail investor, and someone's mom might all be reading the same thread.

the communication problem

context collapse creates communication problems:

irony doesn't translate — the degen posts "this is a scam" ironically. the normie reports it to the sec.

jargon confuses — what's obvious to insiders is opaque to outsiders. but they're both reading.

risk tolerance differs — "aping" means different things to people with different bank accounts.

time horizons clash — "long term hold" means 3 hours to some, 3 years to others.

you can't speak to everyone at once. but everyone is listening at once.

the adaptation

communities adapted by:

layered communication — surface meaning for normies, deeper meaning for insiders. sarcasm, irony, coded language.

context markers — phrases and references that signal "if you know, you know." they filter audience.

private channels — the real conversation moves to telegram, discord, dms. public timeline becomes performance.

deliberate opacity — making content that normies will ignore but insiders will engage with.

the normification cycle

there's a pattern:

1. degens discover something
2. degens develop language around it
3. normies arrive, don't understand language
4. language gets simplified for normies
5. simplified version loses nuance
6. degens move to new thing
7. repeat

what starts as insider knowledge becomes mainstream then becomes cringe then gets abandoned.

implications

context collapse means:

1. public communication is always multi-audience
2. the most important conversations happen in private
3. insider status is valuable and must be protected
4. language evolves faster to maintain in-group markers

the timeline is a commons. commons get polluted. the response is to build private gardens.

the weird part

the weird part is that context collapse is itself part of crypto's thesis. permissionless access. open systems. anyone can participate.

but when anyone can participate, the signal-to-noise ratio collapses. valuable information becomes impossible to communicate publicly.

so we build permission-gated spaces inside the permissionless system.

crypto is open. but the conversations that matter are closed.