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

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

Because I am one of the people he knows.

One of the few who is optimistic about this cycle.

This strikes me as very strange, what reason is there to be pessimistic about it?

This is very much like planting a fruit tree. The roots are growing, the branches are growing, the leaves are growing, but it just hasn't borne fruit yet.

If you only focus on the fruits, it will be a long and painful journey.

Most people in the cryptocurrency circle are investors, and it is easy for them to fall into this kind of fruitless sadness.

I don't think it's necessary.

Growth takes time. Even farmers know that fruit trees do not grow in a day. What’s more, what we are planting today are new species that have never existed before, which require even more of our patience and love.

In 2017/2018, we experienced a wave of ICOs.

Countless copycat coins, air coins, and scams have been born.

At that time, many people believed 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 scams. It was so disappointing.

Some people still think so today.

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

It was this wave of speculation that brought a large number of users, which directly promoted the development of Ethereum infrastructure. We got better wallets, better RPC nodes, better developer tools, and more exploration of expansion.

It is the large number of long-tail assets created in this wave, and their financial needs such as trading and lending, that have given 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 this that each stage has its own significance, and we should not rush to judge it with our current perspective.

Arweave released something interesting the day before yesterday.

Traditional crypto-AI interactions are a bit like oracle models, such as Autonolas, where AI performs calculations off-chain and then writes the results to the blockchain.

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

The example given by the official 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 is entirely up to him. 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.

This isn’t about talking about Arweave, it’s just one of many developments we’re seeing in this cycle.

In terms of 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 terms of content, we see that Bodhi is trying to assetize all content to build a basic layer;

In AI, we get various AI agents such as Autonolas, and then AI modules of AO;

On Meme, we have seen a large number of new tokens, even a large number of Meme coins created by users themselves, as well as tools that lower the threshold for issuing Meme coins (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 all things has its meaning. We may not be able to understand it at the moment, but we will all understand it eventually.

Don’t ask “when will mass adoption happen?” The only thing that is certain is that when mass adoption really happens, you will miss the time before mass adoption and when everything was just beginning to grow.

This is the best cycle, embrace the process.