Crypto 2029: The Ultimate Prediction for the Crypto Industry’s Four-Year Cycle

Original Author: Luke

Original Translation: Saoirse, Foresight News

You are standing on the eve of the biggest transformation in cryptocurrency history. If you want to continue to deepen your involvement in this industry, you must pay close attention to everything happening right now.

Currently, the entire industry faces three core problems:

• What exactly determines the value of a token?
• How can various cutting-edge technologies be implemented in the blockchain ecosystem?
• What will happen to the market when cryptocurrency is no longer a distinct asset class but instead becomes the underlying infrastructure for traditional finance?

I could simply analyze these three questions from a theoretical perspective. Countless people do this every day, but pure theory can never reach a definitive conclusion. Therefore, I plan to take a different approach: stage by stage, I will outline the real changes the industry will undergo from now until 2029. The text will specify concrete entities, data, and timelines. It is detailed enough that everyone can look back in three years and verify whether my judgments are accurate. This is just one of many possible futures, and some deductions are bound to be wrong. But vague, empty predictions about the future cannot be falsified, and unfalsifiable viewpoints are worthless. I would rather give clear judgments that might be wrong than say ambiguous, safe, non-controversial empty words.

The perspective of this prediction stems from my work environment: I have long been deeply involved in the intersection of crypto startups, industry regulation, and venture capital. Every week, I communicate in-depth with alternative asset managers and capital allocators. This doesn't mean my judgment is definitely correct, but my reasoning fully considers the various real-world constraints.

## Mid-2026: Quality Assets Are No Longer Various Tokens

By mid-2026, before the market has uniformly defined a standard for token value, the market for perpetual contracts of non-publicly issued companies has already achieved product-market fit.

This change began with the Hyperliquid platform. The SpaceX non-public issuance perpetual contract listed on the platform was initially criticized for manipulation by Ventuals through malicious liquidation. Later, it became the most-watched price reference target in both the primary and secondary markets. By July, major banks and hedge funds will refer to this contract to price their own private equity assets. Robinhood and other trading software for ordinary users will also use it to predict a company's opening price after its listing. In the weeks before a large company goes public, the price of this perpetual contract will precisely match the final opening price, embarrassing the underwriting teams at investment banks who charge seven-figure fees for pricing. The open interest in perpetual contracts for OpenAI and Anthropic even hit record highs. For a period, this native crypto exchange became the most reliable channel globally for obtaining real-time valuations of top unlisted companies.

At the same time, a fundamental question arises in the minds of ordinary traders: Why can all other types of coins on-chain continue to trade? The altcoin market has been in a bear market for 18 consecutive months. Project founding teams and investment institutions have been continuously exiting through large block trades and time-based algorithm sells. Conversely, $HYPE, the only token to have built a complete value capture loop, has outperformed all other assets in the market. The industry once launched a dozen or so token value capture mechanisms, but most failed to form a positive cycle. The root cause is that the projects these mechanisms are attached to have no asset value themselves. The industry actually solved the technical problem of how a token captures value *first*, and *then* went looking for real assets worthy of carrying that value.

This industry reality of putting the cart before the horse is the underlying driver behind the hype for non-public issuance perpetual contracts. What the market truly craves is never the perpetual contract product itself, but high-quality assets. And in mid-2026, the only high-quality assets tradable on-chain are synthetic yield certificates of real-world companies completely unrelated to the crypto industry.

## Late 2026: The AI Track Doesn't Need Cryptocurrency

Anthropic and OpenAI achieve technological breakthroughs. Competition in the foundational model track becomes intense. The market begins pricing in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) ahead of time. The ensuing chain reaction is: capital continues to flow out of businesses related to all non-leading foundational model companies. Capital starts to view general AI as a core asset held on a company's balance sheet, rather than a standardized tool popularized across the entire industry.

In this environment, the "AI + Crypto" track quietly fades away. It's not that the logic is disproven, but that the industry has no time to argue. The x402 payment protocol is officially launched but has no paying users. The envisioned on-chain agent economy cannot achieve large-scale implementation. All existing agents settle payments in US dollars via APIs, exactly the same as the traditional software industry. The venture capital circle reaches a consensus: the AI industry itself does not need cryptocurrency as support, and investors stop forcibly promoting this track.

The only "AI + Crypto" product currently achieving real product-market fit is the prediction market. The volume of prediction trading around the performance of various foundational models grows rapidly. It also becomes the most accurate financial tool for betting on the core variable that can move massive amounts of capital: which company will have the best-performing model in the next month.

Apart from the noise of the trading screen, another quiet transformation is happening: when the CLARITY Act passed the Senate in mid-2026, most traders thought the bill was inconsequential, and the market didn't see a rally. But by the end of the year, projects for the tokenization of various assets accelerated their implementation. Large asset management institutions moved fully from pilot phases to formal operations, doing so quietly and without publicity – the core job of the compliance department was to avoid grandstanding. The tokenized targets are concentrated in intermediate categories on the balance sheet like money market funds and private credit. These assets don't have KOLs hyping them on social media, nor K-line charts for speculation.

At the end of 2026, the crypto industry splits into two almost non-interacting independent economies: one noisy and bustling, making profits by betting on the AI track; the other silent and low-key, gradually being absorbed by the traditional financial system through pages of compliance documents. The vast majority of industry participants focus their attention on the former market.

## Early 2027: Major Public Chain Foundations Clarify Development Paths

General-purpose public chains can no longer have it both ways with ambiguous positioning.

For years, major foundations have been telling two completely separate narratives externally: publicly preaching the vision of large-scale adoption for ordinary users, while privately pitching institution-oriented supporting services to institutions. These two narratives never intersected. By early 2027, the contradiction between these two development paths becomes fully apparent.

The retail-facing track is highly concentrated. The only retail products with real user demand have their trading volume consolidated on a few trading platforms. Meanwhile, institutional business is currently the only track that can bring in stable paying customers. One after another, major foundations finalize their core development directions, and their choices are highly unified: building enterprise sales teams, supporting compliance services, launching universally compatible compliance development kits for tokenized asset transfer and broker-dealer licensing, expanding partnerships on Wall Street, and improving privacy transaction functions.

Media and crypto social platforms interpret every strategic shift as a trade-off: prioritizing service institutions, abandoning ordinary retail investors, choosing serious financial clients, and discarding the gambling casino attribute.

But practitioners inside the foundations disagree with this interpretation. Teams are instead doubling down on crypto businesses for ordinary users, just with a different implementation logic. Over the years, the threshold for accredited investor designation has been continuously relaxed, expanding the pool of eligible individuals. The institutional infrastructure built by the foundations will be opened to ordinary users, who are currently not classified as "accredited investors," in the short term. The infrastructure teams know this well but won't announce it publicly. The compliance infrastructure teams only talk about bank clients externally because banks are the current paying customers.

The low-key institutional market formed at the end of 2026 faces unprecedented growth: a massive wave of future ordinary compliant investors. The two previously separate economies finally establish a connecting bridge through "accredited investor qualification verification."

## Mid to Late 2027: Three Development Ceilings

A new generation of tech companies rekindles the heat in the private market: fundraising rounds in AI-Bio convergence, physical AI, and humanoid robotics are all oversubscribed, with company valuations skyrocketing, yet they are still years away from going public. Within weeks, perpetual contract platforms list corresponding targets. The open interest in synthetic contracts for these companies with minimal revenue breaks records one after another. The market dynamics of 2026 repeat, but with larger capital volume: the world's most sought-after high-quality assets are all concentrated in the primary private market. The only corresponding targets users can trade on-chain are synthetic perpetual contracts settling funding rates every 8 hours.

However, three types of markets each hit their respective development ceilings, constraining the industry's growth rate:

Ceiling for Non-Public Issuance Perpetual Contracts: Real private assets grow steadily through traditional private channels, compounding in scale each quarter, but have no presence on crypto social platforms that only care about explosive price surges. The growth rate of perpetual contracts lags far behind that of real private assets. The core constraint is that private securities cannot be publicly solicited to investors. The traffic model that the crypto industry excels at – showcasing charts to attract retail investors – cannot be legally applied to these assets. Simultaneously, perpetual contracts have structural weaknesses: they need an upcoming listing event as a price driver, thus only covering mature late-stage companies. Synthetic contracts cannot be launched for mid-stage startups like AI-Bio companies or humanoid robotics firms, which are far from any exit channel. For the vast majority of primary market targets, the legally protected channel of holding real equity is not a second-best option, but the only compliant and feasible trading tool, albeit one the law prohibits from being publicly advertised.

Stablecoin Ceiling: The total circulating supply of stablecoins continues to rise steadily, never stopping its expansion, but major institutions quietly scale back their expansion plans. The midterm elections changed the power dynamics of congressional committees. The candidate list for the 2028 presidential election is gradually being determined. Several popular candidates publicly oppose private dollar token issuance. Although the relevant bills passed in 2025 and 2026 are not repealed, the power to enforce them belongs to the new administration. When bank treasurers plan their decade-long settlement strategies, they must factor in the risk scenario of stricter regulation from the next government. The industry won't completely halt stablecoin projects, but will lengthen implementation timelines and scale down pilot sizes. Everyone is waiting to see the outcome of the November 2028 election. The velocity of on-chain US dollars becomes completely tied to policy uncertainty, and in mid-2027, policy uncertainty is high.

Asset Tokenization Ceiling: This conservative sentiment spreads throughout the entire institutional crypto market. Tokenized private credit and fund share products continue to be launched, all passing compliance requirements, but institutions deliberately control the scale of the projects. No one wants to become a negative case study at the next year's Senate hearing.

The commonality between the three tracks is very clear: the product logic itself is sound, and market demand is fully validated, but external policy forces outside the industry strictly limit the speed of development. Setting aside the crypto industry's own standards of boom and bust, 2027 is actually a year of steady growth for the industry. It's just that the crypto industry, accustomed to the past decade, only considers straight-line upward surges as success.

## 2028: Compliance Barriers Are No Longer Scarce

(From this point onward, the accuracy of predictions decreases: earlier predictions were detailed down to quarters, but after 2028, only yearly extrapolations are given, therefore the margin of error in predictions expands. This article assumes one core hypothesis: the Democratic candidate wins the November 2028 general election. If the election result is reversed, the timing of various industry events will shift, but the overall development framework will not change.)

The speculative gambling casino aspect of the crypto market gradually fades away, making it nearly impossible to pinpoint the exact turning point. The mechanism for capital extraction is too efficient. Every influx of new liquidity from 2026 to 2027 is smaller than the previous one, and the capital is drained faster by a handful of top players. There is no landmark crash event. Memecoin hype cycles will still appear intermittently, with daily price surges. However, after a certain point in the first half of 2028, speculative trading is no longer the core focus of the industry. Trading volume exists merely as a statistic, no longer dominating the ecosystem's culture. Some traders shift their attention to prediction markets, riding the wave of hype. Some remain in the continuously shrinking speculative segment. And a large number of traders spent the past year doing something no one anticipated in 2026: obtaining accredited investor qualification.

Policy-related panic is gradually priced into the market throughout the year. Popular candidates from both major parties accept industry donations, albeit with different rhetoric, but their core stance is unified: the crypto industry needs regulation, not a complete ban. Practitioners who treated the previous lenient regulatory environment as a window for harvesting capital are one by one investigated. The industry slowly realizes that regulatory cleanup is actually a positive signal: the government distinguishes between speculative harvesting businesses and financial infrastructure. Only infrastructure can receive capital investment confidently. The bank treasurers who scaled back pilot programs in 2027 quietly resume their expansion plans before the election. By the time the election results are known, most of the policy risk premium has already been priced in.

The most profound lesson for the industry in 2028 comes from the trading market everyone was watching: early in the year, a large position on a top trading platform, large enough to move the market, triggers simultaneous liquidations across several popular non-public issuance perpetual contracts. The cascading liquidation risk that the market has feared since the Ventuals manipulation event fully erupts. Within hours, tens of billions in open interest are wiped out. The system triggers auto-deleveraging, distributing losses across the market and significantly reducing profits for winning positions. Afterwards, no party can determine whether this volatility was due to malicious manipulation or a pure market accident. This ambiguity itself is the core conclusion: a market lacks a fair benchmark price without an underlying spot anchor. Not even "market manipulation" can be defined, let alone evidenced. Perpetual contracts for listed companies have spot prices as constraints, but non-public issuance perpetual contracts have no underlying anchor. While there are compliant trading channels for real private shares, they do not allow large-scale public promotion or widespread pricing. The price of each perpetual contract is merely the platform's own estimate, leaving significant room for human intervention. This cascade was not a failure of the synthetic contract market itself, but an inevitable result of the market mechanism operating without the support of real underlying assets.

For the past decade, the ban on public solicitation of private securities has been packaged as investor protection policy. But this market blowup proves: this rule simply locks ordinary investors out of legally protected trading channels, pushing them into the high-leverage, price-unanchored synthetic contract market instead. The true dividing line has never been between synthetic and real assets, but between whether the trading rights have legal enforceability.

The new regulations introduced by regulators after the blowup are more of a refinement of the underlying financial mechanism than a radical reform: regulators issue guidance allowing the public promotion of secondary market trading in private securities to qualified accredited investors (limited to secondary shares, not including initial rounds of company fundraising). The pool of eligible investors has been expanding for years. The underlying logic is straightforward: the synthetic contract market needs an underlying price anchor. The cheapest solution is to open up the public circulation channels for real private assets. An advertising restriction rule that has been in place for ninety years is significantly relaxed, just to perfect the derivatives market.

The buzz in the first week of the new rules rivals that of a new memecoin listing, with the sole difference being that the trading target is equity in real companies. The listing of private secondary shares, sharing screenshots, and community promotion are all legalized for the first time in the history of this asset class. Opinions on social media are divided: half of the practitioners see it as a fundamental new financial tool, while the other half worry that retail investors will become the exit liquidity for venture capital firms. The latter's intuition is correct, but their judgment lags behind the times: this concern holds when the asset is an air token without underlying support. But now, the trading targets are the income rights to real-world companies that the perpetual contract market has proven the entire market craves over the past two years.

Capital first flows into the late-stage mature companies already validated by hype in the perpetual contract market. Because real shareholding has no funding rate and no listing time constraints, capital further flows into mid-stage startups that perpetual contracts cannot cover. Perpetual contracts don't die; they transform into a supplementary segment for late-stage company trading, no longer dominating the core traffic of the market.

By December, the industry enters a new bull market. What supports this rally is the most ancient and foundational asset class in finance, which has finally gained a legal circulation channel.

## 2029: The Market Becomes the Industry's Sole Core Theme

This is the first full year of the bull market's implementation, and its trajectory is completely different from previous crypto bull markets. This difference is its core value. The assets experiencing continuous price increases are all tech companies with real businesses that create tangible social value. The brand new basic asset class for ordinary users is precisely private company equity: biotech companies completing multiple rounds of clinical trials, humanoid robot manufacturers whose demos everyone has seen, and the AI labs whose perpetual contracts everyone traded in 2026. Now users can directly hold the real shares of these companies.

After a decade of step-by-step relaxation of the accredited investor threshold, a new type of retail investor has been cultivated. Assets that only institutions could access five years ago are now tradable by ordinary compliant investors. Most people won't even classify this type of trading as "cryptocurrency investing."

The token track divides completely along the core questions posed at the beginning of the article: Public chains that successfully transform into the underlying issuance and settlement infrastructure for the new market capture real business flow. The platform token is equivalent to a certificate of entitlement to the business's cash flow. All other tokens will face an extremely realistic market rule: tokens lacking legally enforceable income rights and a complete value capture loop will not suffer a slow 18-month decline like in 2026, but will directly and completely lose trading liquidity. The industry's endless debate in 2026 over token value capture mechanisms didn't result in a single winning solution. The circulation of real private assets directly rendered the entire debate irrelevant.

Stablecoins follow the development pattern throughout this entire