Potential Future Crypto Hype Cycles
What areas seem to have popped up during this cycle that could come back in a big way during the next cycle?
If Maker foreshadowed DeFi mania, and if Crypto Punks foreshadowed NFT mania, what is being foreshadowed right now?
I have a few ideas:
Social Media
Some of you might remember BitClout. It was an awful product that a bunch of Twitter influencers shilled to their followers that ended up going nowhere, but made the shills a bunch of money.
I do think something like that is coming though. Maybe it will be AAVE’s social media platform, maybe it will be Farcaster, it’s hard to say. But I think that there will be a surge in interest for trustless, decentralized social protocols and these could be a big source of speculation next cycle.
One thing that helps this theory is that these kinds of tools need layer 2s or low-cost layer 1s to function. You can’t build a crypto twitter on Ethereum. It needs to be on a Polygon or a ZK Rollup. So they kinda have to wait for the technology to catch up.
Layer 2 Tokens
We saw this during this cycle with Polygon’s MATIC token, which had an insane run. But that was the only highly-active layer 2-esque network that had a token attached which people could speculate on.
By the time the next cycle comes around, there will be MATIC, OP, ARB, STARK, IMX, and who knows how many other Layer 2 tokens. And you can bet people will just start launching “Layer 2s” and making up tokens for them to cash in.
So I suspect we’ll see some wild speculation around the Layer 2 ecosystem as well.
Gaming
I’ve written about gaming a lot so I’m obviously biased. And gaming did have a hype cycle during this run, so it’s not quite as subtle as some of the others, but I think it’s going to come back in a major way.
During this cycle, almost all gaming speculation was based on variations of the Axie (and really, Crypto Kitties) breeding ponzi mechanism.
Games will improve on this and launch new ways of playing & earning, and we’ll see a much more sophisticated wave of games take off and attract a ton of new people into crypto.
Metaverse (ugh)
God I have the “metaverse” meme. But people will absolutely buy imaginary land, furniture, basically anything that was popular in Second Life.
It didn’t take off much this cycle because there aren’t any good “metaverses” to hang out in, and the VR tech isn’t that good yet. But it’s getting good scary fast, and once there’s a killer VR app with crypto enabled, it’s game over.
This one is nice at least because if you’re a digital artist you could make a ton of money too. It’s not just a boon for speculators.
Blockchain B2B SaaS
There aren’t a ton of examples of this right now, but one good one is Gnosis. They have a token, but it hasn’t done that much. And they’re one of the most used protocols in all of crypto.
As more businesses start building blockchain apps, and as they need more services, the companies providing those services will probably start to issue tokens for everyone to speculate on. If those tokens offer cashflows from the most popular SaaS companies… that could be pretty slick. I’m slightly less confident on this one, but on-chain infrastructure seems untapped as an area for speculation in crypto thus far.
Bridges
Despite the hacks and blowups, bridges aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. They’ve only just started launching tokens, and they never had a huge hype cycle like the other areas in crypto, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see some action here during the next meta cycle.
Taking Advantage of These Potential Cycles
So if some of these are going to take off, how do we take advantage of them? For me, I’m just holding the blue chips from this cycle for these different areas for the projects I believe in.
One example would be the Optimism token. It’s one of the few airdrops that I’ve held onto, since I think it came out quite late in this cycle (too late for speculation) and it could come back in a big way next cycle. Same for MATIC and IMX.
But the other good way to take advantage is to just get involved in the community for one of these areas. Get your ear to the ground so you know what’s coming out, and just be early to the new players in that field before the hype cycle starts. Then once it does, just don’t be left holding the bag.