When price volatility becomes the sole frame of reference, the growth of Web3 has fallen into a vicious cycle of “surging in bull markets and collapsing to zero in bear markets”. The key to breaking this cycle lies in rebuilding the cornerstone of growth, rather than designing more complex incentive models. Who exactly are we incentivizing? This paper examines the structural flaws in Web3 growth, and analyzes how ME Network, through its “identity-first” logic, has built a new growth path that shifts from “addresses” to “individuals”, and from “speculative traffic” to “sustainable participation”.
Introduction: The Vanishing “Y-Axis”
The lifecycles of tokens and applications are growing ever shorter, with the pattern of spiking during bull markets and collapsing to zero in bear markets becoming the norm. On-chain activity, TVL (Total Value Locked), and transaction counts all surge in lockstep in a bull market, yet once the bear market hits, projects fall dormant and their charts flatline to zero. Price has become the sole axis for understanding the blockchain economy.
If we strip away price fluctuations, what exactly can blockchain leave behind for the lives of ordinary people?
This question is asked far too rarely, yet it strikes at the very core of Web3’s survival.
Structural Defects of Growth: Who Is Being Incentivized?
The growth dilemma of Web3 is seemingly a traffic problem, yet its essence lies in structural defects. The prevailing growth models generally face three major structural challenges:
1. Sybil Attacks and Incentive Distortion
A vast number of incentive campaigns fail to distinguish between real individuals and scripted accounts. A single user can create dozens or even hundreds of addresses to repeatedly siphon off airdrops and incentives. For project teams, this translates to sunk costs; for genuine users, this amounts to unfair competition. Noise drowns out signals, and governance decisions are hijacked by fraudulent participation.
2. Governance Hijacked by Whales
The governance of most public chains relies on the weight of token holdings. On the surface, everyone has voting rights, but in reality, decision-making power is concentrated in the hands of a small number of whales. Furthermore, short-term token holders often dominate governance, leaving the long-term interests of the ecosystem poorly represented. An ecosystem propped up by speculative traffic will flee at the onset of a bear market, leaving nothing but empty addresses behind.
3. The “Sisyphean Cycle” of Incentive Mechanisms
Traditional incentive schemes fail time and again within this fault line:
Airdrop Incentives: They attract airdrop farmers rather than users who recognize the project’s intrinsic value. Once the incentives end, user activity plummets off a cliff, trapping the project in a vicious cycle of “burning cash for growth”.
Token Staking: It operates on the assumption that users are willing to hold network assets they never actually use for the long term. When asset prices fall, staking becomes locked-in losses.
Community Co-construction: While it is a beautiful vision, it lacks a clear mechanism for measuring contributions, making it difficult to sustain community vitality.
Under this model, growth has devolved into a numbers game, rather than the accumulation of real value.
From “Address” to “Individual”: The Growth Logic of Identity Reconstruction
To fix the structural flaws in growth, the focus must shift from designing more complex incentive layers to rebuilding the very foundation of growth: Who exactly are we incentivizing?
This ushers in a fundamental paradigm shift from “address” to “individual”. ME Network puts identity at its core, making it the prerequisite for all incentives, governance and entitlements, rather than an afterthought feature.
1. Identity First: The Foundational Design of One Account Per Person
The core design of ME ID is that every user who completes KYC is matched with a unique ME ID. Compliant PoP (Proof of Personhood) verification is enforced to guarantee “one account per person”. All distributions, governance and entitlements are benchmarked against this identity, not wallet addresses.
The critical linchpin is “identity as a prerequisite for incentives”. When “real human participation” becomes the cornerstone of the ecosystem’s operation, the breeding ground for Sybil attacks is completely eliminated.
2. Permanent Staking: Becoming an “Ecosystem Shareholder”
Once a user completes ME ID advanced verification, the system will bind a permanently staked MEC to their account. This MEC cannot be withdrawn, traded or transferred. It has been in a permanent staking state since the genesis block, and generates continuous UBI (Unconditional Basic Income) yields every day.
Users do not need to do additional staking or perform frequent operations, as the system automatically and continuously distributes yields to accounts with bound identities. This resolves users’ anxiety about “losing core entitlements due to inactivity”. Both “light users” who only bind their identity and “heavy users” who participate in depth are included in the same economic model.
3. Multi-Entry Overlaid Incentive Network
Basic UBI Yields: Available immediately upon ME ID binding, guaranteeing the fundamental right to subsistence.
Voluntary Staking Yields: For users with a long-term optimistic outlook, voluntary staking unlocks additional yields.
Contribution Incentives: Corresponding rewards for referrals, community operations and ecosystem development.
Basic rights and action-based returns are separated. Users will not lose their core entitlements due to “inactivity”, while those willing to contribute have access to a clear, transparent yield structure.
Model Validation: A Layered Structure From “Address” to “Individual”
Let’s take a closer look at how this mechanism operates within the ecosystem. If traditional models incentivize “address-based behaviors”, the new model precisely anchors three categories of roles:
Category 1: Survival-Oriented Users
By binding her ME ID, User A receives UBI proceeds generated from permanent staking. This provides her with a basic “digital base salary”. At this layer, the system removes the barriers to complex financial operations, enabling the broadest user base to access the system at zero cost, and validates the inclusiveness of “identity as the anchor for rights and interests”.
Category 2: Investment-Oriented Users
As a developer or a firm believer, User B chooses to increase his MEC holdings and lock them up for the long term. On top of the base returns, he gains weightage benefits by taking on greater risks. This layer delivers security and capital depth to the network, and proves that “identity verification” can more effectively screen for participants with long-term value consensus.
Category 3: Contribution-Oriented Users
Community organizer User C earns additional incentives through the referral mechanism, with his returns directly derived from his efforts to expand the network of real users. This layer solves the incentive problem of “who will acquire new users”, internalizes growth momentum, and ensures that growth stems from real individuals rather than scripted addresses.
The three categories of users occupy different positions and levels of engagement in the ecosystem, yet are unified under the cornerstone of “identity verification”. Real identities, combined with the modular architecture design of ME Network, jointly form an open and prosperous infrastructure. Real identities will drive real economic activities into the ME ecosystem, boost the value capture of MEC, and in turn feed back to benefit all ME ID holders.
Boundaries and Costs of Technical Paths
Guided by the same core concept of identity uniqueness, different projects have chosen different paths. There is no perfect solution, only trade-offs:
ME Network has opted for the KYC + PoP verification path. While this directly confronts compliance complexity and operational costs, it also delivers comparative advantages: privacy minimization and economic binding. It has abandoned pure technological idealism such as iris scanning, and chosen a path that is more easily understood and accepted by the general public in the real world.
Conclusion: The Fundamental Shift in Growth Logic
The growth dilemma of Web3 is rooted in the mismatch between incentive mechanisms and real identities. Only when identity becomes the prerequisite for incentives can the growth logic shift from “traffic scale” to “identity quality”.
From “address” to “individual”, from “speculative weight” to “behavioral contribution”, ME Network is validating a distinct growth path. It confronts the technical challenges of Web3 head-on, and further touches upon a fundamental sociological proposition: in a digital world, how to redefine the value of “human beings”, and enable this value to grow sustainably.
Whether this mechanism can truly resolve the growth dilemma of Web3 still requires data observation over a longer cycle. But at the very least, it provides a new coordinate system worthy of deep reflection: after the Y-axis (price) fades away, how can we build an X-axis (value) that truly belongs to human beings.
About Meta Earth
Meta Earth (ME) is based on a modular, high-performance, infinitely scalable multi-dimensional fusion underlying value network — ME Network, which supports the high-concurrency big data processing needs of traditional industrial applications.
And through an encrypted DID (Decentralized Identifier) system — ME ID & ME Pass which can effectively protect user privacy data, and a co-construction & co-governance mechanism which can fully reflect personal sovereignty and equality for all, as well as an economic model which can guarantee UBI (Unconditional Basic Income) without any distinction, Meta Earth is fully dedicated to enhancing happiness for a better life and maintaining ecological balance to promote sustainability.
If you want to receive more airdrops or rewards, please download the ME Pass and complete advanced verification. See more on the poster! 👇👇👇
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