Imagine an extreme scenario: one day, discussions about a top-tier DeFi protocol suddenly go silent across the entire network.

It's not a technical failure, not a security incident, just collective silence. Influencers stop talking, the community remains mute, and the media have no content. This is called **"memetic death"**—a form of collective forgetting in social psychology. No negative news, no bearish sentiment; instead, it's even more terrifying—a complete silence.

TVL numbers still display, smart contract code continues to run, but no one interacts, no one discusses. It sounds absurd, but for the DeFi ecosystem, this is more deadly than a hacker attack.

**Why is that? Because DeFi protocols essentially live within people's "narratives."**

Without a story, there is no hype. Without hype, market makers will gradually withdraw liquidity from pools. On-chain trading volume declines, token prices start to detach from their anchors. Governance proposals go unvoted, and the protocol becomes a lifeless corpse. The underlying tokens (like slisBNB) lose their market-making support, lisUSD stablecoin turns into dead code, and veLISTA voting rights become meaningless.

This reveals a harsh truth: **In this dopamine-driven ecosystem, being forgotten is equivalent to a death sentence.**

Sometimes, protocols are even forced to create controversy to break this deadlock. They actively trigger system fluctuations, launch highly contentious governance proposals, or even attack themselves—all to attract attention again. This isn't conspiracy theory; it's survival instinct. In an age of scarce attention, a protocol must perform and generate topics like an actor on stage, or it risks being forgotten.

It's a tragic dilemma: protocols worth billions of dollars end up relying on "creating chaos" to prove they are still alive. Because in the algorithmic world, unobserved equals nonexistent.