Why Current Times Are Regarded as the Best Phase for the Cryptocurrency Industry

Li Yang asked me to write an article discussing my views on this cycle.
Because I am one of the few people he knows who have a positive outlook on this cycle.
This makes me feel very strange. What reasons are there not to be optimistic?
It’s like planting a fruit tree, the roots are growing, the branches are growing, the leaves are growing, it’s just that it hasn’t borne fruit yet.
If you only focus on the fruit, it will be a long and painful process.
Most people in the cryptocurrency industry are investors, and it is easy for them to fall into the sadness of not seeing immediate results.
But I think there is no need to worry.
Growth takes time, even farmers know that fruit trees do not grow in one day, let alone the new species we are planting today, which requires our patience and love.
In 2017/2018, we experienced a wave of ICOs, giving birth to countless scam coins, air coins, and scams.
At that time, many people believed that crypto had taken the wrong path and were ashamed to mention this period of history.
People thought that crypto was a great thing that could transform society and save humanity, but it was being used to issue these meaningless tokens, and even scams. They were very disappointed.
Some people still hold this view today.
However, looking back from today, we will come to a completely different conclusion.
It was the influx of users brought about by this speculative wave that 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 creation of a large number of long-tail assets in this wave that gave birth to the prosperous DeFi ecosystem we have today, driven by their financial needs such as trading and lending.
We can even say that 2017/2018 was the most important period in the life of Ethereum.
We should learn from it. Each stage has its own meaning, and we should not rush to judge it from the current perspective.
Arweave released something interesting the day before yesterday.
Traditional crypto-AI interaction is a bit like an oracle model, such as Autonolas, where AI performs calculations off-chain and then writes the results onto the blockchain.
But Arweave, because of its special contract mechanism, allows you to store and execute the entire large model within the contract, achieving on-chain native AI interaction with assets. This not only eliminates centralized risks but also enhances composability.
The examples provided by the official are very interesting. They created a game where a “llama coin” was issued. You can find the Llama King and exchange your real assets ($AR) for this llama coin, but whether he gives you the coin or not depends entirely on his will. This king is controlled by AI.
Assets issued entirely by NPC control were 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 discussing Arweave, it is just one of the many developments in this cycle.
In terms of gaming, in the past year, we have gained more truly playable blockchain games and many better tools.
In terms of social interaction, we have experienced projects like Friend.Tech that tokenize people and completely decentralized social networks like Farcaster.
In terms of content, we have seen Bodhi trying to tokenize all content assets to build a foundational layer.
In terms of AI, we have gained various AI agents like Autonolas and AI modules from AO.
In terms of memes, 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 in the past year, is essentially similar. We can clearly see that crypto is gradually extending to other peripheral things. These things themselves are also intangible: games/people/relationships/content/AI/memes. It is just that people are still exploring how crypto should interact with them.
Don’t ask “What’s the meaning of this?” All things have their own meanings in their growth. We cannot comprehend it at the moment, but eventually, we will understand.
Don’t ask “When will there be mass adoption?” The only thing we can be certain of is that when there is truly mass adoption, you will miss the era when it was still in its infancy, when everything was just sprouting.
This is the best cycle, embrace the process.