Why is the current period the best for the crypto industry?

Author: zhangluyao

Li Yang asked me to write an article to talk about my views on this cycle.

Because I am one of the few people he knows who is optimistic about this cycle.

This makes me feel very strange. What reason is there to be pessimistic?

It is very similar to planting a fruit tree. The roots are growing, the branches are growing, and the leaves are growing, but it has not yet borne fruit.

If you only focus on the fruit, it will be a long and painful time.

Most of the people in the currency circle are investors, and it is easy to fall into this kind of sadness without fruit.

I don’t think it’s necessary.

Growth takes time. Even farmers know that fruit trees don’t grow in one day. What’s more, what we plant today are some new species that have never been seen before, which requires our patience and love.

In 2017/2018, we experienced a wave of ICO, which gave birth to countless copycat coins, air coins, and scams.

At that time, many people thought that crypto had gone astray and were ashamed to mention this history.

People thought that crypto was a great thing that could transform society and save humanity, but it was used to issue these meaningless tokens, or even a scam. It was so disappointing.

Some people still think so today.

However, looking back today, we will come to a completely different conclusion.

It was the large number of users brought by this speculative wave that directly promoted the development of Ethereum's infrastructure. We got better wallets, better RPC nodes, better developer tools, and more exploration of expansion;

It was the large number of long-tail assets created in this wave, and their financial needs such as trading and lending, that gave birth to our prosperous DeFi ecosystem today.

We can even say that 2017/2018 is the most important period in the life of Ethereum.

We should learn from it that each stage has its own meaning, and don't rush to judge it with the current perspective.

The day before yesterday, Arweave released something interesting.

The traditional crypto-AI interaction is a bit like the oracle model, such as Autonolas, where AI will perform calculations off-chain and then write the results to the blockchain.

And Arweave, due to its special contract mechanism, you can store the entire large model in the contract and execute it, realizing the interaction between native AI and assets on the chain. This not only eliminates the risk of centralization, but also enhances composability.

The official example is very interesting. They made a game in which a kind of "alpaca coin" was issued. You can find the alpaca king and exchange your real assets ($AR) for this alpaca coin, but whether he gives you this coin depends entirely on his will. This king is controlled by AI.

The issuance of assets completely controlled by NPCs was unimaginable in the past. But obviously, it is not limited to this, and there are more possibilities in the future.

We are not talking about Arweave, but just one of the many developments in this cycle.

In games, we have gained more truly playable full-chain games and many better tools in the past year;

In social networking, we have experienced a series of projects such as Friend.Tech, which tokenizes people, and Farcaster, a completely decentralized social network;

In content, we see Bodhi trying to assetize all content to build a basic layer;

In AI, we have obtained various AI agents such as Autonolas, and then AO's AI module;

In Meme, we have seen a large number of new tokens, even a large number of Meme coins created by users themselves, and tools that lower the threshold for Meme coin issuance (such as pump.fun).

All of the above, all of which have happened in the past year, are similar in nature. We can clearly see that crypto is gradually extending to other peripheral things. These things themselves are also virtual things: games/people/relationships/content/AI/Meme, but people are still exploring how crypto should interact with them.

Don’t ask “what’s the meaning of this”, the growth of everything has its meaning, we cannot comprehend it at the moment, but we will understand it in the end.

Don’t ask “when will there be mass adoption”, the only thing that is certain is that when there is really mass adoption, you will miss the era when there was no mass adoption and everything was budding.

This is the best cycle, embrace this process.