Written by: NingNing
To summarize my personal investment experience over the past 24 years, it is to copy Dalio's all-weather investment principles to diversify the investment portfolio across every cycle affecting the crypto market (seasonal cycles within the year, 4-year bull-bear cycles, Gaitner's technological innovation cycles, and the Merrill clock cycles), and follow Taleb's barbell strategy, focusing on allocating Alpha assets in the Bata track and Beta assets in the Alpha track.
Thus, my current portfolio mainly consists of Alpha assets in chain abstraction, AI Agent, and PayFi projects. The inclusion of these assets has helped my overall portfolio yield easily outperform the market in December. When rebalancing the portfolio to capture Q1 Alpha returns in 2025 at the end of the year, I suddenly realized that my Alpha asset allocation logic is relatively singular, solely revolving around the main line logic of 'disruptive innovation' in technology.
Recently, after hearing MegaETH co-founder Biscuit's remarks about community vibe in Space, I reflected on it while lying in bed late at night.
In the field of crypto investment, there are actually two investment logics: one is the so-called technological determinism, and the other is community supremacy.
Generally speaking, as a non-hypothetical rational person, I usually regard community vibe and cult culture as noise manufactured by big fraudsters and small fools for mutual benefit, and I don't pay much attention to it.
Recently, however, I purchased a Fat Penguin NFT due to my optimism about the consumer chain Abstract in the chain abstraction space, which allowed me to experience community vibe for the first time as a stakeholder rather than a bystander. This experience gave me a long-lost sense of social belonging and community acceptance, and coupled with Biscuit's insights, I began to intentionally break through my previous cognitive cocoon and explore projects with a strong community vibe, such as Monad, Sonic SVM, MegaETH, BeraChain, etc.
Sonic SVM is the first instance of Sonic's Solana L2 Stack architecture HyperGrid, positioned as the Web3 TikTok Chain, targeting millions of Generation Z game consumers on TikTok.
Previously, I wrote a long research post for Sonic (see retweet), and during the writing process, the 'spin-off theory' of the market creator kept surfacing in my mind. Frankly, at that time, I did not realize the real value of narratives like consumer chain/community vibe, and from a technical perspective, while Sonic's HyperGrid makes sense, it is far less sexy than new L2 technical primitives like Preconf, Based Rollup, and parallel EVM.
However, after half a year, comparing the operational status and community maturity of Sonic SVM with those L2s that have sexy technical primitives, one can find a vast gulf of difference between building for consumers and the abstract concept of Web3 mass adoption in terms of products and outcomes.
Currently, Sonic SVM is building a TikTok App Layer—SonicX, which will airdrop its native token $SONIC to all users who register through TikTok. Relying on Account Abstraction, TikTok users do not need to separately configure a Web3 wallet to directly experience on-chain interactions within the app and complete the airdrop collection on the TikTok side.
SonicX has attracted over 2 million users to engage in games, challenges, and live streams within the app through TikTok's premium advertising and creator collaborations, creating a seamless experience akin to Web2. Additionally, Sonic SVM plans to integrate more games on http://SonicX.app, gradually building the 'TikTok Chain' ecosystem, where eligible users can earn token rewards during the airdrop period.
TikTok has over 1.5 billion global users, while Telegram has 900 million global users, but the lifetime value of TikTok users far exceeds that of Telegram. Recently, ChillGuy's crazy hype has shown us the monetization potential of TikTok users. We seem to not have to worry about the chaos like Telegram's mini-programs that occurred before, which ultimately only exchanged valuable liquidity in the crypto market for a bunch of low-value junk users.
In 2023, while working at a small crypto fund, a senior colleague told me that a main line in value investing is 'go to big market'. After completing the 0-1 innovation, whoever can better occupy a larger market through rapid replication and enhanced growth flywheel will be the ultimate winner. And now, when Vitalik feels that blockchain infrastructure is already in oversupply, whoever can reach consumers faster and occupy consumer mindshare more will be the next era's Web3 infrastructure.