Title: Embracing the Process: A Perspective on the Crypto Cycle
Author: zhangluyao
Li Yang asked me to write an article to discuss my views on this cycle. I am one of the few people he knows who has a positive outlook on this cycle. This makes me feel strange. What reasons are there not to be optimistic? It’s like planting a fruit tree – the roots, branches, and leaves are growing, it just hasn’t borne fruit yet. If you only focus on the fruit, it will be a long and painful journey.
The cryptocurrency world is mostly made up of investors who easily fall into the sadness of not seeing immediate results. However, I believe there is no need to worry. Growth takes time, even farmers know that fruit trees do not grow overnight. Moreover, what we are planting today are new species that have never existed before, which requires our patience and love.
In 2017 and 2018, we experienced a wave of ICOs, giving birth to countless altcoins, worthless tokens, and scams. Many people thought that crypto had taken the wrong path and felt ashamed to mention this period in history. People believed that crypto was a great thing, capable of transforming society and saving humanity. Yet, it was being used to issue meaningless tokens and even scams, leading to disappointment.
Some people still hold this view today. However, looking back from today’s perspective, we would come to completely different conclusions. It was the speculative wave that brought a large number of users directly driving the development of the Ethereum infrastructure. We obtained better wallets, RPC nodes, developer tools, and explored more possibilities for scalability.
It was also this wave that created a large number of long-tail assets, giving birth to the thriving DeFi ecosystem we have today. We can even say that 2017 and 2018 were the most important periods in the life of Ethereum. We should learn from this that each stage has its own significance, and we shouldn’t rush to judge it based on the present.
Arweave recently released something interesting. Traditional crypto-AI interaction is somewhat like an oracle model, where AI performs calculations off-chain and writes the results into the blockchain. However, due to Arweave’s unique contract mechanism, you can store and execute entire large models within the contract, achieving on-chain native AI and asset interaction. This not only eliminates centralized risks but also enhances composability.
The official example they provided is intriguing. They created a game where they issued a “Llama Coin”, and you can find the Llama King and exchange your real assets ($AR) for this Llama Coin. However, whether the King gives you the coin entirely depends on his will. This King is controlled by AI.
The issuance of assets completely controlled by NPCs was unimaginable in the past. But clearly, it is not limited to this, and there are even more possibilities in the future.
Discussing this is not about Arweave alone; it is just one of the many advancements in this cycle. In gaming, we have gained more truly playable blockchain games and better tools in the past year. In social media, we have experienced projects like Friend.Tech that tokenize individuals and completely decentralized social networks like Farcaster. In content, we see Bodhi attempting to assetize all content to build a foundational layer. In AI, we have various AI agents like Autonolas and AI modules like AO. In memes, we have witnessed numerous new tokens, even meme coins created by users themselves, along with tools like pump.fun that lower the barrier for meme coin issuance.
All of the above, everything that has happened in the past year, fundamentally shares a similarity. We can clearly see that crypto is gradually extending its reach to other peripheral things. These things themselves are intangible: games, people, relationships, content, AI, and memes. People are still exploring how crypto should interact with them.
Don’t ask, “What is the significance of this?” The growth of all things has its meaning, which we cannot comprehend at present, but eventually, we will understand. Don’t ask, “When will there be mass adoption?” The only certain thing is that when true mass adoption occurs, you will reminisce about the era when mass adoption had not yet happened, when everything was just starting to sprout.
This is the best cycle; embrace the process.