Written by: 0xLoki
The main line of this round has become quite clear:
1/ Memecoin and AI are the absolute main lines of the track.
This year's Memecoin is very different from previous years, having moved away from the concept of "speculating on dog coins". It corresponds to the DeFi concept of 2020, essentially a brand new way of asset issuance. All infrastructure and services must rely on asset issuance; the leftist route of asset issuance is Memecoin, while the rightist route is RWA and VCcoin.
The leftist route is a global opportunity, while the rightist route is more about structural opportunities. For example, the revival trend of DeFi, the evil axis of ENA+Sky+Morpho, and old protocols like Curve and AAVE have also shown significant business growth. There are also some structural opportunities in BTCfi, CeDefi, and Payfi.
So I still don't have high hopes for ETH. Currently, ETH can only carry side narratives. Although Coinbase will greatly benefit from the main narrative, to me, it looks more like the warlords of eighteen factions each with their own agendas discussing Dong, rather than the Three Heroes fighting Lü Bu with a united front. One likely scenario is that ETH's exchange rate can't outrun BTC on the upside, can't outrun Solana on the middle, and can't outrun DeFi blue chips on the downside.
2/ The influence of Western policy narratives has only played a small part.
During the campaign phase, the narratives of Trump and Musk have already demonstrated great potential. There are still two bigger things to come: ① formal inauguration ② replacement of the SEC chairman. At the same time, ETH and MSTR have already taken over the previous cycle's grayscale tasks, and more enterprises and sovereign nations will start to allocate, which will only be bigger than in 2020.
The Western bull market has continued.
Under the combination of the above internal and external factors, the importance of ecology has become very clear. For ecosystems that already have strong consensus or secondary consensus, I won't elaborate further, but I will mention two ecosystems that still have very low attention:
3/ Bittensor ecology
I recommend Vitlik's recent interview, which has nothing to do with ETH, but contains some interesting viewpoints, including thoughts on the monopolization and authoritarianism of AI and the future symbiosis of AI. The big Beta in the Memecoin space is undoubtedly ACT, and the Beta answer for the Alts sector is also very clear; Crypto AI can only be deAI or Fair AI, so Bittensor >> Worldcoin.
It is worth mentioning that last week the media reported that the most promising candidate for the new SEC chairman is Teresa Goody Guillén, a partner at BakerHostetler law firm and co-head of the blockchain team. She is also the legal partner of Bittensor's first subnet, Masa. Since the news came out a week ago, despite BTC's pullback, $MASA has still risen about 30%.
4 Near ecology
As the saying goes, those who are a step ahead eat meat, and those who are ten steps ahead eat shit. Near belongs to this situation. At the beginning of this year, when Solana Memecoin was just gaining popularity, Near's Memecoin quickly caught up, producing two targets: Black Dragon and One Dragon. Near's founder @ilblackdragon also participated in Nvidia's AI conference.
But for a while afterwards, Memecoin and AI were lukewarm. Now the wind of Memecoin and AI has picked up, blowing towards Solana, Base, SUI, BNBChain, but the Near players are already three meters high in grass on their graves.
However, the good news is that there is a metaphysical theorem: from DeFi to X2E, then to NFT and inscriptions, Near always manages to catch the last train and get the last bite of warm food, but public chains that are later than Near basically miss out on everything. Near belongs to that type that eats but arrives, and can stir things up with a more substantial approach. I just looked, the three-meter high grass on the grave of Memecoin@dragonisnear and the five-meter high inscription@inscriptionneat, both still have $7m and very good exit liquidity.
