In July 2025, I was unemployed and looking for work when I watched The Shawshank Redemption for the first time. I watched it several more times afterward, and eventually came up with the Web3 Project Analysis Plan.
In September 2026, The Shawshank Redemption had its first theatrical release in China. Five days after I wrote Virae’s Latest Progress and Challenges, Virae.ai officially shut down, and most of the team disbanded. Thinking back to seeing The Shawshank Redemption at the cinema a few days earlier, I began to think about restarting the Web3 Project Analysis Plan.
The Shawshank Redemption is a great film—so great that you see echoes of it everywhere in life. I took stock of my debts and fixed monthly expenses. Once again, money has me trapped.
We seem free, but in reality, we cannot go anywhere. Without money, you cannot even fill up the car to drive away. Without money, a hotel room at 200 yuan a night adds up to 6,000 yuan a month. Without money, even if you are standing right outside Universal Studios, a 700-yuan ticket per person can keep you out. Without money, all the good things in the world are out of reach.
I used to laugh at a joke: work makes us look forward to growing old and retiring. I have never looked forward to retirement, because I have not been paying into a pension. But now, I seem to be looking forward to other things: a bull market, paying off my debts, a big rise in Bitcoin. All of these are things that happen in the future. Looking forward to the future means looking forward to growing older.
So we need a way to live in the present. Andy, the protagonist of The Shawshank Redemption, is an example to follow. Even in prison, he keeps chipping away at the wall every day with a little rock hammer. He does it for twenty years and eventually escapes. That is Andy’s Plan B. His Plan A, clearly, was to hope that the warden would help him overturn his conviction.
It is so much like our situation as employees. We are inside a workplace, and our Plan A is to hope the project succeeds. But as long as you remain a wage earner, as long as you have not moved beyond your social class, you have to work for someone else for the rest of your life. How is that different from life imprisonment? In that sense, we are already serving a life sentence, which makes it all the more necessary to have a Plan B for our lives, like Andy digging his tunnel.
I have almost no hobbies in the conventional sense. This blog itself is actually a kind of hobby: I keep writing even though no one reads it, and I still want to put time into it. That is what a hobby is. Blogs as a medium have long since fallen out of fashion, but they still serve a few particular purposes. I will keep maintaining this blog. When Vitalik stops updating his blog, I will stop updating mine.
Back to the Web3 Project Analysis Plan. I got a lot of things wrong last year, such as:
This time, I will post on X, in Chinese, using this account:
Although I eventually stopped updating the project analysis series last year, I still used those research skills extensively in my actual work, without consciously setting out to do so. That included analyzing Polymarket’s user and trading volume data, and researching many third-party projects in its ecosystem—from their founders and funding to the current state of their development. It is just that all that information may have been buried in group chats.
One more thing: restarting the Web3 Project Analysis Plan is not the real Plan B yet. It is more like Andy building a library and listening to music in prison. As for the real Plan B, we still need to think about that.