How Tezos continues building through cycles of attention

One thing I’ve come to realize after spending years in crypto is that we’re obsessed with momentum. That includes me. Maybe it’s because many of us entered the space through stories of life-changing gains. Maybe it’s because crypto moves at a pace unlike any other industry. Or maybe it’s simply because we’ve been conditioned to measure success through charts, market caps, user growth, and whatever narrative happens to be dominating the conversation at the time.

Regardless of the reason, I’ve done some reflection and come to realize that we should start valuing longevity more than temporary momentum.

Before you say that’s coping, hear me out.

Momentum Is Easy To See

The thing about momentum is that it’s impossible to miss. When a project has momentum, everyone knows it. User numbers are growing, developers are joining, influencers are talking about it, and the charts are usually moving in the right direction. Momentum creates excitement. It creates optimism. It creates the feeling that you’re part of something important and growing. That’s one of the reasons we value it so much. It’s visible, measurable, and constantly reinforced by the people around us.

Longevity, on the other hand, is much harder to appreciate. Not many get excited because a blockchain successfully completed another protocol upgrade. Very few rush to social media because a team improved developer tooling or because a governance process worked exactly as intended. These things often happen quietly in the background, receiving little attention outside of the people directly involved. Yet over time, they become part of the foundation that allows an ecosystem to continue evolving long after the initial excitement has faded.

Now, I’m not suggesting that longevity automatically creates momentum. If that were true, every project that survived long enough would eventually become a market leader. We know that’s not how crypto works. New ecosystems can emerge seemingly out of nowhere and attract enormous attention in a short period of time. In fact, many of the biggest success stories in crypto started as newcomers that captured a narrative at exactly the right moment.

What longevity does create, however, is opportunity. Momentum comes and goes. Narratives change. User behavior changes. Entire sectors can rise and fall within a few year. Ecosystems that survive those shifts, continue improving their foundations, and keep attracting builders, give themselves multiple opportunities to participate in future waves of adoption. They may miss one cycle, catch the next, and benefit from another years later. The longer they remain relevant and continue building, the more chances they have to be in the right place when the next breakthrough arrives.

That’s why I’ve started questioning whether we’ve confused momentum with strength. Momentum tells us who is winning attention today. Longevity tells us who is still standing when the spotlight moves somewhere else. And if crypto has taught us anything over the years, it’s that those are often two very different things.

The Hic et Nunc Lesson

Perhaps the best example of this can be found in Tezos’ own history. Back in 2021, Hic et Nunc helped create a wave of momentum across the ecosystem. Artists were arriving daily, collectors were discovering Tezos for the first time, and the chain was suddenly finding itself at the center of conversations taking place far beyond its existing community. For many people, Hic et Nunc became their first introduction to Tezos, while for others it was their first meaningful introduction to crypto altogether, a form of real adoption that brought them into the space through creativity rather than speculation.

If you had asked people a few years earlier what would drive a major wave of adoption on Tezos, I doubt many would have answered “digital art.” Yet that’s exactly what happened. A platform built around artists and collectors ended up becoming one of the most important chapters in Tezos' history and helped establish the chain as a serious home for art.

Of course, Hic et Nunc didn’t appear in a vacuum. The blockchain was already there. The wallets and the infrastructure were already there. A community was already beginning to form around the ecosystem. And more importantly, Tezos offered transaction fees that were dramatically lower than Ethereum’s at a time when high gas costs had become a huge barrier for artists and collectors. Today, low fees are common across much of the industry, but back then they were a meaningful advantage and one of the main reasons people were willing to jump over and explore Tezos. Those low fees weren’t an accident, they were the result of years of infrastructure work that had already taken place. Those years of work didn’t guarantee success, but they created an environment where success could happen when the opportunity appeared, and it did.

The NFT boom that dominated headlines in 2021 is long behind us. Hic et Nunc itself is gone (though its legacy continues through Teia, Objkt, and the broader Tezos art community). The speculative frenzy that attracted so many people to the space has largely moved on to other narratives. Yet years later, the Tezos art scene remains one of the strongest and most active communities in the space. Artists continue creating, collectors continue collecting, galleries continue organizing exhibitions, and new projects continue emerging.

To me, that’s the difference between temporary attention and lasting impact. The momentum didn’t last forever, but it left behind a culture. It left behind relationships, communities, platforms, and a creative identity that still attracts people to Tezos today. While the headlines eventually moved elsewhere, a significant part of what was built during that period remained.

The goal isn’t to hold on to the same momentum forever. That’s rarely how crypto works. The real value comes from turning a moment of momentum into something that continues creating value long after the spotlight has moved on.

Nobody Knows Where The Next Wave Comes From

Crypto has an incredible ability to surprise even the people who spend the most time trying to predict it. If you had asked me years ago whether memecoins would become a multi-billion-dollar sector, whether uranium would be tokenized on-chain, or whether AI agents would become a serious topic of discussion, I probably would have dismissed all three. And yet, here we are.

That same pattern is exactly what makes Hic et Nunc so interesting in hindsight. It didn’t just create momentum for Tezos, it showed how quickly attention can shift toward something almost nobody had planned for.

That pattern is still playing out today, just in different forms. One example is TzEL, along with other experiments happening across the ecosystem that wouldn’t have made sense a few years ago but are now possible because enough infrastructure and tooling exist for people to actually try them.

Whether any of these ideas and experiments become important later is almost impossible to know. Most of them won’t. Some of them might. And occasionally, one of them will end up reshaping how people see the entire ecosystem.

The point is that we need to keep having developments like Tezos X, DAL, and all that infra work that allows people to try new things that weren’t possible before, because that increases our chances for completely new disruptive ideas to emerge.

And remember, it’s not only about new ideas emerging. There is also the aspect of the market’s attention rotating back to things that existed for so long, but were “early” and didn’t get the attention they deserved until many years later.

Take Zcash for example, which after almost 10 years since its creation, came back to the spotlight for something that it has had since day one (privacy), simply because the market focus suddenly turned towards that, and the timing was right again.

Similarly, who can say that formal verification, which is one of Tezos’ great strengths, isn’t going to be something that the industry starts to pay more attention to? Especially now with progress in AI-assisted tools making formal verification much more accessible than it used to be, along with institutions and big companies getting into the blockchain space, and requiring top-notch security around their projects.

This, of course, shouldn’t be taken as another attempt to predict a trend or just staying hopeful until something happens, though. The point I’m trying to get across is that we need to keep building our ecosystem because the more we prepare, the more possible it becomes that we get to ride the next wave of adoption. We just need to stay strong, resilient, and keep building.

Longevity Over Momentum was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.