Source: Talking about Li and other things
CES2025, known as the Spring Festival Gala of the technology industry, was held as scheduled these two days. NVIDIA once again became one of the focuses, and Huang Renxun also demonstrated a series of products, including:
- Project DIGITS (a $3,000 personal supercomputer said to be 1,000 times more powerful than a typical laptop)
- The new RTX Blackwell series (including RTX 5090)
- NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 (data center superchip with 72 Blackwell GPUs)
- NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Blueprint (Simulation workflow for synthetic motion generation)
- Thor Blackwell (next generation automotive processor)
- NVIDIA Cosmos (open source, open weighted video world base model)
Huang also predicted that Robotaxis and Self-Driving will become the first trillion-dollar industries, and NVIDIA will work with Toyota to produce the next generation of self-driving cars. In addition, they also plan to deploy self-driving trucks on a large scale in 2027.
Compared with the excitement in the technology industry in the past two days, the crypto market seems to have kept many people awake all night. According to on-chain data, 176,564 people had their positions liquidated in the past 24 hours, with a total amount of $562 million, of which the main liquidation was long orders, reaching $504 million. As shown in the figure below.
Then this morning I also found that some of the partners in the group also had some new reviews and reflections on the market in the past two days. I think this is very good. Trading is a serious matter. We should manage our positions and control our emotions as soon as possible. As shown in the figure below.
Many people have been complaining about the market recently, but I think this matter may need to be viewed comprehensively:
From the perspective of price, in this cycle, BTC has risen from around $15,000 to around $108,000 now, and ETH has risen from around $800 to a high of around $4,100, which are actually quite a lot.
From the perspective of development, after years of failure, spot ETFs finally passed the review last year (2024), and the inflow of funds into BTC ETFs and ETH ETFs has continued to set historical records. Moreover, with the entry of large institutions such as BlackRock and MicroStrategy, and the coming to power of Trump, a crypto-friendly US president, the crypto industry has now become a recognized industry, and even in the near future, Bitcoin may be included in the strategic reserve plans of more and more countries.
Although the market may continue to face various problems in the short term, from a long-term perspective, we are very optimistic about the development of the crypto market.
1. The most difficult bull market in history to make money
So far, this round of bull market has been described by many as "the most difficult bull market in history to make money". We actually understand this view very well, because compared with the previous rounds of bull markets, most of the rise in this round of bull market seems to be driven by external macro factors. According to some partners, there is basically no internal innovation in this round of bull market.
Regarding the problem of lack of innovation, we have actually discussed this in previous articles of Hualihuawai. We believe that this is also an inevitable path for the development of things. Because as an industry develops from wild development to maturity, the internal innovation engine will usually slow down in stages. This can be simply understood as a natural phenomenon.
But then again, in some special cases, even if an industry's internal innovation engine slows down, prices may still rise. An important logic here is the external factors we just mentioned (such as ETFs driving this round of bull market).
As far as the current crypto market (or crypto industry) is concerned, we believe that lack of innovation may not be the most fundamental problem. One of the core reasons for market volatility now may be that the overall sentiment is slowly developing a qualitative change.
Because in the past, the crypto market was a completely wildly growing industry, full of radical ideas and high-risk gaming, and blockchain changing (or even revolutionizing) the real world became the slogan of most people. Now, with the popularization and promotion of ETFs, the increasing participation and adoption of traditional large institutions, and the continuous supervision and follow-up by government departments... more and more people are beginning to return to rational investment, and no longer pursue the radical ideas and high risks in the traditional sense of the "cryptocurrency circle".
Vitalik seems to be ahead of the curve when it comes to how things develop, as he mentioned in a previous blog post about his broader vision:
“we are not here to just create isolated tools and games, but rather build holistically toward a more free and open society and economy, where the different parts — technological, social and economic — fit into each other.”
“We are here not just to create isolated tools and games, but to build a more free and open society and economy in which different parts can be integrated with each other, such as the integration between technology, society and economy.”
But at present, Vitalik’s personal vision seems to have diverged from ETH’s vision. Although we are still optimistic about ETH’s future performance, it is obvious that ETH now seems to have lost its original ambition, and Ethereum seems to have unloaded some of its original vision to L2.
2. Is AI an innovation?
We just talked about innovation, and some people may start to disagree: Aren’t the AI agents that are very popular recently considered innovation?
I certainly don’t deny this. I mentioned above that the innovation engine within the crypto industry is slowing down, but I didn’t say that there is no innovation at all in the crypto industry. As far as this cycle is concerned, if we have to summarize a more representative innovation that can convince most people, it is estimated that the AI x Crypto concept will rank in a relatively important position.
Here we might as well continue to explore the innovation of AI:
If we recall the past cycle, we should be able to intuitively find that the concept of AI has been popular for several rounds in this cycle.
First, at the end of 2022, ChatGPT became popular all over the world and set off a craze for large AI models. At that time, we also published some articles about ChatGPT, but later some articles were inaccessible. As shown in the figure below.
Subsequently, tokens related to the AI concept began to be hyped, prices began to rise, and a number of AI-related MemeCoins began to appear. If you have experienced the first quarter of 2023, you should still remember the market conditions of AI concept coins at that time.
Secondly, starting from around September to October 2023, as the new round of bull market is getting closer, various sectors began to rise, and one of the more representative sectors was AI narrative. During that period, we also shared and sorted out some AI-related projects, as shown in the figure below.
Once again, there is the AI Memes that we experienced last year, and the AI agents craze that we are experiencing now.
After recalling the major crazes of AI x Crypto in the past few years, if we stop and think about it, we will find a more obvious problem: AI is actually more of an external innovation.
In fact, we can simply see this from NVIDIA's stock trend in the past few years. In the past five years, NVIDIA's stock has increased by 2,193.62%, as shown in the figure below.
In other words, if this round of bull market was not driven by external innovative AI concepts, which further popularized the concept of AI x Crypto, the crypto market would probably be much less interesting, and there would not be so many MemeCoins (although most of them are just empty words that will return to zero). Moreover, MemeCoin seems to be one of the core narratives that can still maintain the wild growth of the original "cryptocurrency circle" in this round of bull market, because the only use of MemeCoins is gaming, and this unique get-rich-quick (or return to zero) model of the cryptocurrency circle does not seem to be disturbed or interfered with by external factors.
Apart from this (AI x Crypto), we don’t seem to see too many innovations that can continue to be popular in this cycle. Bitcoin inscription ecosystem concepts such as BRC20 have only been popular twice, and the Runes concept has not even seen the large-scale outbreak that people imagined at the beginning. Many other so-called new concepts (innovations) have completely died out in less than 2 weeks. In contrast, in the last bull market cycle, we were able to see a lot of innovations from within, such as DeFi, NFT, GameFi (P2E), and Metaverse.
In short, the ICO boom in 2017 can be regarded as an internal innovation, and DeFi in 2020 (including various innovative token economics models, liquidity mining, algorithmic stablecoins, etc.) can be regarded as an internal innovation. In this cycle, most projects no longer pursue internal innovation, nor do they pursue visions that can change the world. They prefer to issue coins through simple copying methods (or pseudo-innovation) to reap profits.
However, as long as there is an opportunity for hype, this field will continue to attract people who dream of getting rich quickly to join in, even if it is full of higher risks and more dark forest laws (survival of the fittest, veterans make money from novices).
Perhaps, we are experiencing some bubbles now, or are about to face a bigger bubble. At the same time, we are also experiencing the problem of slowing down or even stagnating our internal innovation engine. But the wheel of history is definitely moving forward. Maybe in the near future, after the current so-called bubble, at least 1-2 killer applications will be precipitated and continue to promote the development of the industry. As for who will have the last laugh, we don’t know. We can only leave it to the market and time to verify.
If you are just speculating in this field and are not optimistic about its future development, then you are free to do whatever you want as long as you can bear the risks. If you hope to grow with the crypto field, you should be patient and pay more attention to narratives or projects with long-term development visions. There is no need to seek far and near in this regard. The easiest way is to hold BTC, or you can directly choose the project you are most optimistic about from the current top 100 market capitalizations. Here are a few examples:
Chainlink ranks 13th in market capitalization. If blockchain wants to connect with the real world, it cannot do without oracles. Chainlink has a good foundation and advantages in this segment.
Uniswap, which ranks 20th in market capitalization, has become increasingly accepted by the public for DEX. As the DEX with the highest market share, Uniswap can be compared to an "excellent company" in the traditional financial field.
AAVE, ranked 31st in market capitalization, is currently a leader in the lending field, accounting for more than 60% of the market share. It is a project that major institutions are optimistic about, so why don’t you like it?
Ethena, ranked 46th by market capitalization, is a synthetic dollar protocol with fully transparent on-chain support that integrates DeFi, CeFi, and TradFi.
Pudgy Penguins, ranked 53rd in market value, remember that this project was quite popular in 2023 and was called the "new NFT king" at the time because it was able to go against the trend when the entire NFT market was sluggish. At the same time, it became a highly exposed project and is expanding the Web3 IP brand to Web2.
WorldCoin, which ranks 60th in market value, has been popular for a while after its launch, but it has also generated a lot of controversy later, such as privacy issues. Using the Orb device to scan human eyes (irises) is a very radical behavior, but if this project can be successful in the future, then the commercial price may be revolutionary.
Arweave, which ranks 94th in market capitalization, is not a topic that people discuss much about now, but there is actually an underlying demand in this field. In terms of application, the implementation and real adoption of AR at least seem to be relatively good.
Of course, we just randomly selected a few projects from the top 100 market capitalizations as examples above. You need to conduct targeted research based on your preferences. The above content is not investment advice.
3. How long will the popularity of AI agents last?
Let’s go back to the topic of AI and expand on it to talk about AI agents. According to the on-chain data, AI agents still ranked first in the past 30 days, which shows how popular they are. As shown in the figure below.
I remember when I was working, some people always shouted the slogan of innovation, and they innovated for the sake of innovation, but in the end they just piled up the same things little by little, and most people didn’t actually think outside of their own box. This seems to be somewhat similar to the most popular AI Agents in the crypto market.
According to on-chain data, there are currently at least 1,000 AI Agents-related projects, of which more than 100 projects (tokens) are relatively active in transactions, and the total market value of Agents-type tokens has exceeded US$15 billion, as shown in the figure below.
As usual, as long as a concept (narrative) becomes popular, new tokens will emerge like mushrooms after rain. Now, AI agent tokens based on ai16z, Virtual and Swarms ecology (framework) are still increasing rapidly, and scams targeting the Agents concept have obviously increased. The risk can be said to be getting bigger and bigger. If you still want to catch this train now, then you can't be blind, and try to do what we mentioned in the article: don't touch it if you don't understand it.
Before getting involved in any Agents project, you should do some necessary research, such as:
- Enter TG through the project's website to see what people are actually discussing.
- Find the GitHub entrance through the website and check whether the number of files or the code situation is reasonable. For example, try to avoid projects that upload code using the Add files via upload method or update records without detailed description information. (For the use of the GitHub platform, you can search for tutorials on Google/YouTube.)
- Search on social platforms to see how the corresponding project is discussed and whether others have any comments.
- Check the distribution of tokens, whether a small number of wallets hold most of the tokens, whether the top 100 wallets holding tokens are mostly newly created wallets, etc.
And so on...In short, you should find the dimension that you are more interested in and try to understand the project as much as possible, instead of buying it blindly.
As for how long the AI Agents token issuance craze that started in November last year will last, we don’t know. It may last until the end of the first quarter of this year. But it is foreseeable that as the popularity of AI Agents decreases, most of these tokens will return to zero like MemeCoin, because in addition to many fraudulent tokens (such as those that are packaged as intelligent agents on the surface but are actually operated by humans behind the scenes), most of the remaining ones are chatbots with memetic and social properties, without actual technological innovation. But in the end, there will definitely be at least 1-2 awesome projects.
This is how it is in this field. Various kinds of heat (hype) come and go, and people reap the profits one after another. However, this does not affect people's enthusiastic participation, because people only see the increase (are conquered by the increase). In fact, any popular narrative is the same. Most of the people who rush into the market after the heat comes up will eventually become the bag holders.
This market has never lacked so-called hot topics (hype). If AI Agents lose their popularity one day, perhaps new hot combinations such as AI + DeFi will take over.
