Emergence from the Clouds This is the Best Cryptocurrency Cycle Yet

Author: Luyao
Li Yang asked me to write an article about my thoughts on this cycle.
I am one of the few people he knows who have a positive outlook on this cycle.
This makes me feel very strange. What’s the reason not to be optimistic?
It’s like planting a fruit tree. The roots are growing, the branches are growing, the leaves are growing, they just haven’t borne fruit yet.
If you only focus on the fruit, it will be a long and painful process.
Most of the cryptocurrency circle is made up of investors, who are easily swayed by this sadness of not seeing the fruit.
I think there’s no need to worry. Growth takes time, even farmers know that fruit trees don’t grow in a day, let alone the new species we planted today, which require 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 the time believed that cryptocurrencies had gone astray, and were ashamed to mention that period of history.
People thought that crypto was something great, a thing to transform society and save humanity, but it was used to issue these meaningless tokens and even scams, which was disappointing.
Some people still think that way today.
However, looking back today, we will come to a completely different conclusion.
It was the influx of users from this speculative wave that directly drove the development of the Ethereum infrastructure, giving us better wallets, better RPC nodes, better developer tools, and more exploration into scalability;
It was the large number of long-tail assets created in this wave that gave birth to 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 this that every stage has its own meaning, and we shouldn’t rush to judge it with a current perspective.
The day before yesterday, Arweave released something interesting.
Traditional crypto-AI interaction is a bit like an oracle, such as Autonolas, AI does the computation off the chain, and then writes the results into the blockchain.
With Arweave’s unique contract mechanism, you can store an entire large model in the contract and execute it, achieving native AI interaction with assets on the chain. This not only eliminates centralized risks but also enhances composability.
The examples given by the officials are very interesting. They have created a game in which a “llama coin” is issued. You can find the llama king and exchange this llama coin with your real assets ($AR), 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 is something that was unimaginable in the past. But it is obviously not limited to this, and there are more possibilities in the future.


Talking about these is not just about Arweave, it is just one of the many developments in this cycle.
In games, over the past year, we have gained more truly playable full-chain games and many better tools;
In social aspects, we have experienced the tokenization of people by Friend.Tech and completely decentralized social networks like Farcaster, among other projects;
In content, we see Bodhi trying to tokenize all content to build a basic layer;
In AI, we have gained various AI agents such as Autonolas, and AI modules from AO;
In Memes, we have seen a large number of new tokens, even a large number of meme coins created by users themselves, as well as tools to lower the threshold for meme coin issuance (such as pump.fun).
Everything that happened over the past year is essentially similar. We can clearly see that crypto is gradually extending to other peripheral things. These things themselves are virtual: games/people/relationships/content/AI/Memes, it’s just that we are still exploring how crypto should interact with them.
Don’t ask “What’s the point,” everything’s growth has its meaning, we can’t understand it now, but eventually, we will.
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 miss the time when it hadn’t happened yet, where everything was just budding.
This is the best cycle, embrace the process.