There is a very obvious sense of pessimism in the Crypto circle right now. Many OGs have started to play AI in the US stock market, mocking the lack of new narratives in Crypto while showing off recent huge profits from US stocks.

I admit that since the DeFi revolution in 2021, Crypto has indeed entered a period of innovation stagnation. Over the past few years, many so-called new narratives are essentially just re-packaged old assets, chains replacing old methods, old Ponzi schemes with new terminology. There are not many things that can truly reopen the industry's ceiling.
Technological development has never been linear but jumps in spurts. After the Bitcoin white paper appeared, the market also experienced a long period of dormancy; after Ethereum emerged, DeFi didn’t appear immediately. True paradigm shifts often happen quietly when most people think “there’s nothing left, it’s a scam, this industry is done,” accumulating infrastructure, then suddenly exploding at a certain point.
Blockchain itself is a revolution, and on-chain smart contracts and DeFi are also revolutions. But revolutions don’t happen every year. Most of the time in between, it’s bubble bursts, infrastructure building, speculation retreat, and consensus rebuilding. No one knows where the future opportunities lie now. It could be AI Agents and on-chain payments, it could be global stablecoins and cross-border settlements, it could be RWA and on-chain bond markets, it could be prediction markets, or it could be assets re-anchoring after sovereign credit deterioration.
But I know one thing: Crypto is still the closest thing to what I believe is a “truly open financial system.” Assets can flow 24/7, contracts are executed by code rather than centralized institutions having absolute interpretive power, individuals can self-custody assets, and users worldwide can trade and collaborate on the same settlement layer. Although imperfect, full of garbage, scams, and bubbles, it at least offers an alternative to traditional financial systems. That’s why I wouldn’t easily dismiss it just because there haven’t been new narratives for a year or two.
This doesn’t mean the bottom has definitely been reached now, or that there won’t be one last dip. From a cycle perspective, the adjustment period doesn’t seem to be fully over, and whether this round will be different due to mainstream capital like ETFs entering is also uncertain. But Crypto remains a very important part of my personal asset allocation, and it’s an industry I’ve been studying and working on seriously for a long time. From a multi-year perspective, I believe this year will be a good year to build positions and hold long-term.
Pessimists are correct, but optimists are wealthy.
Of course, none of the above constitutes any investment advice.