Original author: Haotian (X: @tmel0211 )
I just finished chatting with a few big guys in the industry, and everyone was discussing the same thing...
The theory of four-year cycle is completely outdated!
If you are still holding on to your hopes of getting rich quickly, and still fantasizing about the opportunity to win ten or a hundred times in a bull market, you may have been completely abandoned by the market. Why?
Because smart money has discovered a secret long ago, Crypto is no longer applicable to one set of gameplay, but 4 completely different gameplay cycles are running at the same time:
The rhythm, gameplay, and money-making logic of each gameplay cycle are completely different.
Bitcoin super cycle: retail investors are out, and a decade of slow bull market may be inevitable
The script of the traditional halving cycle? It has completely failed! BTC has evolved from a hype target to an institutional allocation asset. The capital volume and allocation logic of Wall Street, listed companies, and ETFs are completely different from the bull-bear switching gameplay of retail investors.
What are the key changes? Retail investors are handing over their stakes on a large scale, while institutional funds represented by MicroStrategy are rushing in. This fundamental reconstruction of the stake structure is redefining BTCs price discovery mechanism and volatility characteristics.
What do retail investors face? The double squeeze of time cost and opportunity cost. Institutions can afford a 3-5 year holding period to wait for the long-term value of BTC to be realized, but what about retail investors? Obviously, they cannot have such patience and capital layout strength.
In my opinion, we are likely to see a BTC super slow bull market that will last for more than ten years. The annualized rate of return is stable in the range of 20-30%, but the intraday volatility is significantly reduced, which is more like a steady growth technology stock. As for what the upper limit of BTCs price will be? From the perspective of retail investors now, it is even difficult to predict.
MEME short-wave cycle of attention: from slum paradise to professional leek-cutting field
The MEME long bull theory is actually valid. During the window period when technical narrative expression is lacking, the MEME narrative will always coordinate with the rhythm of emotions, funds and attention to fill the boring vacuum of the market.
What is the essence of MEME? It is a speculative vehicle for instant gratification. No white paper, no technical verification, no roadmap is needed, just a symbol that can make people smile or resonate is enough. From cat and dog culture to political MEME, from AI concept packaging to community IP incubation, MEME has evolved into a complete emotional monetization industry chain.
What’s worse is that MEME’s “short, flat and fast” characteristics make it a barometer of market sentiment and a reservoir of funds. When funds are abundant, MEME becomes the preferred testing ground for hot money; when funds are scarce, MEME becomes the last speculative haven.
However, the reality is cruel. The MEME market is evolving from a grassroots carnival to a professional competition. The difficulty for ordinary retail investors to make profits in this high-frequency rotation is increasing exponentially.
P Stories about young players creating legends by sitting back and doing nothing may become less and less common. The entry of studios, scientists, and big players will make this former slum paradise extremely inward-looking.
The long cycle of technological narrative leap: bottom fishing in the Death Valley, starting with 10 times in 3 years?
Has the technology narrative disappeared? It doesn’t exist. Innovations that really have technical barriers, such as Layer 2 expansion, ZK technology, AI infra, etc., require 2-3 years or even longer to build before they can see actual results. Such projects follow the technology maturity curve (Gartner Hype Cycle) rather than the sentiment cycle of the capital market - there is a fundamental time misalignment between the two.
The reason why technology narratives are criticized by the market is that when the project is still in the conceptual stage, it is overvalued, and then underestimated in the death valley stage when the technology really begins to land. This determines that the value release of technology projects presents a non-linear leap-forward feature.
For investors with patience and technical judgment, deploying truly valuable technology projects in the Death Valley stage may be the best strategy to obtain excess returns. But the premise is that you have to be able to endure the long waiting period and market suffering, as well as potential cynicism.
Innovation hot spots are short-lived: 1-3 months window period, brewing the main rising wave narrative
Before the main technology narrative is formed, various small narratives rotate rapidly, from RWA to DePIN, from AI Agent to AI Infra (MCP+A 2 A), and each small hotspot may only have a window period of 1-3 months.
This narrative fragmentation and high-frequency rotation reflect the dual constraints of the current markets scarcity of attention and the efficiency of rent-seeking funds.
In fact, it is not difficult to find that the typical small narrative cycle follows a six-stage model: Concept verification → Capital testing → Public opinion amplification → FOMO entry → Valuation overdraft → Capital withdrawal. Want to profit from this model?
The key is to enter during the proof of concept to fund testing stages, and exit at the peak of FOMO entry.
Competition between small narratives is essentially a zero-sum game of attention resources. However, there are technical correlations and conceptual progressions between narratives. For example, the MCP (Model Context Protocol) protocol and the A 2 A (Agent-to-Agent) interaction standard in AI Infra are actually a reconstruction of the underlying technology of AI Agent narratives. If subsequent narratives can continue the previous hot spots, form a systematic upgrade linkage, and truly precipitate a sustainable value closed loop in the linkage process, it is very likely that a super narrative with a main upward wave level similar to DeFi Summer will be born.
Judging from the existing small narrative pattern, AI infrastructure is most likely to achieve breakthroughs first. If the underlying technologies such as MCP protocol, A2A communication standard, distributed computing power, reasoning, data network, etc. can be organically integrated, it is indeed possible to build a super narrative similar to AI Summer.
above.
In general, only by recognizing the nature of these four parallel play cycles can we find the right strategy in their respective rhythms. Undoubtedly, the single four-year cycle thinking can no longer keep up with the complexity of the current market.
Adapting to the new normal of multiple gameplay cycles in parallel may be the key to truly making profits in this bull market.
