Emerging from the Clouds This is the Best Encryption Cycle Yet

Author: Luyao
Li Yang asked me to write an article about my views on this period.
I am one of the few people he knows who are optimistic about this period.
This makes me feel very strange. What reason is there not to be optimistic?
It’s like planting a fruit tree. The roots are growing, the branches are growing, the leaves are growing, but they just haven’t borne fruit yet.
If you only focus on the fruit, it will be a long and painful wait.
Most cryptocurrency investors are quick to fall into this despair of not seeing results.
I think there’s no need for such despair. Growth takes time. Even farmers know that fruit trees don’t grow in a day, let alone the new species we’re planting today. It requires our patience and love.
In 2017/2018, we experienced a wave of ICOs, giving birth to countless altcoins, air coins, and scams.
Many people at that time believed that crypto had gone astray and were ashamed to mention that period in history.
People thought that crypto was something great, a tool to transform society and save humanity, and it was being used to issue these meaningless tokens, and even scams, leaving them disappointed.
Some people still think that way to this day.
However, looking back today, we would come to a completely different conclusion.
It was the wave of speculation that brought in a large number of users, which directly promoted the development of the Ethereum infrastructure. We gained better wallets, better RPC nodes, better developer tools, and more exploration into scalability;
It was the large number of long-tail assets created during this wave that spawned the flourishing DeFi ecosystem we have today.
We can even say that 2017/2018 was the most important period in the life of Ethereum.
We should learn from it that every stage has its own significance, and we shouldn’t rush to judge it with the perspective of the present.
The day before yesterday, Arweave released something interesting.
Traditional crypto-AI interactions are a bit like oracle models, such as Autonolas. AI performs calculations off-chain and then writes the results into the blockchain.
However, due to its special contract mechanism, Arweave allows you to store the entire big model in the contract and execute it, achieving native AI and asset interaction on-chain. This not only eliminates the risk of centralization but also enhances composability.
The examples provided by the official are very interesting. They created a game where they issued a “llama coin”. You could find the Llama King and exchange this coin for your real assets ($AR), but whether he gives you the coin or not depends entirely on his will. This king is controlled by AI.
The issuance of assets completely controlled by NPCs is something that was unimaginable in the past. But obviously, it is not limited to this, there are more possibilities in the future.


Talking about these things is not about talking about Arweave, it is just one of the many developments in this period.
In gaming, over the past year, we have gained more truly playable blockchain games and many better tools;
In social media, we have experienced the tokenization of people with Friend.Tech and completely decentralized social networks like Farcaster, among other projects;
In content, we see Bodhi attempting to tokenize all content to build a foundational layer;
In AI, we have obtained various AI agents like Autonolas, and the AI module of AO;
In Meme, we have seen a large number of new tokens, even Meme coins created by users themselves, and tools that lower the threshold for Meme coin issuance (such as pump.fun).
All of the above, everything that happened over the past year, is essentially similar. We can clearly see that crypto is gradually extending to other peripherals. These peripherals are also virtual things: games/people/relationships/content/AI/Meme. People are still exploring how crypto should interact with them.
Don’t ask “what’s the point”, everything has its purpose in growing, and we cannot comprehend it now, but eventually, we will understand.
Don’t ask “when will there be mass adoption”, the only thing we can be sure of is that when there really is mass adoption, you will long for the time when it hadn’t yet been adopted on a mass scale, when everything was just beginning to sprout.
This is the best period, embrace the process.