Author: Haotian
I just finished chatting with several industry leaders, and everyone was discussing the same thing...
The "four-year cycle" theory is completely outdated!
If you're still holding onto dreams of getting rich and fantasizing about "ten or hundred-fold opportunities in a bull market," you might have already been completely abandoned by the market. Why?
Because smart money has already discovered a secret: Current Crypto no longer follows one strategy, but has 4 completely different gameplay cycles running simultaneously:
Each gameplay cycle has a completely different rhythm, approach, and profit logic.
Bitcoin Super Cycle: Retail Investors Exit, Ten-Year Slow Bull Likely Inevitable
The traditional halving cycle "script"? Completely invalidated! BTC has evolved from a "speculative target" to an "institutional asset allocation". The fund size and allocation logic of Wall Street, listed companies, and ETFs are entirely different from retail investors' "bull-bear switching" approach.
What's the key change? Retail investor chips are being massively transferred, while institutional funds represented by MicroStrategy are frantically entering. This fundamental restructuring of chip structure is redefining BTC's price discovery mechanism and volatility characteristics.
What are retail investors facing? A double squeeze of "time cost" and "opportunity cost". Institutions can afford a 3-5 year holding cycle to wait for BTC's long-term value realization, but retail investors? Clearly, they cannot have such patience and capital deployment capabilities.
In my view, we will likely see a BTC super slow bull lasting over ten years. Annual returns stabilizing in the 20-30% range, with significantly reduced intraday volatility, more resembling a steady-growing tech stock. As for BTC's price ceiling, it's even difficult to predict from the current retail investor perspective.
MEME Attention Short Wave Cycle: From Slum Paradise to Professional Harvesting Ground
The MEME long bull theory actually holds, and during technical narrative expression gaps, MEME narratives will always fill the market's "boredom vacuum" in sync with emotions, funds, and attention.
What's the essence of MEME? It's a speculative vehicle for "instant gratification". No whitepaper needed, no technical verification required, no roadmap necessary - 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 "emotion monetization" industrial chain.
The deadly part is that MEME's "short, fast, and quick" characteristics make it a barometer of market sentiment and a reservoir of funds. When funds are abundant, MEME becomes the first choice for hot money; when funds are scarce, MEME becomes the last speculative safe haven.
However, the reality is cruel. The MEME market is evolving from "grassroots carnival" to "professional competition". The difficulty for ordinary retail investors to profit in this high-frequency rotation is rising exponentially.
The legendary stories of P sitting idle may become increasingly rare. The entry of studios, scientists, and big players will make this once "slum paradise" intensely competitive.
Technical Narrative Leap-Forward Long Cycle: Death Valley Buy the Dips, 10x Minimum in 3 Years?
Technical narrative disappeared? Impossible. Truly innovative technologies with high barriers, such as Layer2 scaling, ZK technology, AI infrastructure, etc., require 2-3 years or even longer build time to see actual results. Such projects follow the technology maturity curve (Gartner Hype Cycle), not the capital market's emotional cycle - there's a fundamental time misalignment between the two.
The reason technical narratives are criticized by the market is entirely due to overvaluation during the conceptual stage, and then undervaluation during the "death valley" phase when technology actually starts to land. This determines that technical project value release presents a non-linear, leap-forward characteristic.
For investors with patience and technical judgment, deploying truly valuable technical projects during the "death valley" phase might be the best strategy for obtaining excess returns. The premise is that you must be able to endure a long waiting period, market torment, and potential ridicule.
Innovative Small Hot Spot Short Cycle: 1-3 Month Window, Brewing Major Narrative Uptrend
Before the main technical narrative forms, various small narratives quickly rotate, from RWA to DePIN, from AI Agent to AI Infra (MCP+A2A), with each small hot spot possibly having only a 1-3 month window.
This narrative fragmentation and high-frequency rotation reflect the current market's attention scarcity and fund rent-seeking efficiency constraints.
In fact, it's not difficult to find that typical small narrative cycles follow a six-stage model: "Concept Verification → Fund Probing → Public Opinion Amplification → FOMO Entry → Valuation Overdraft → Fund Withdrawal".
Want to profit from this pattern? The key is to enter between "concept verification" and "fund probing" stages, and exit at the "FOMO entry" peak.
Competition between small narratives is essentially a zero-sum game of attention resources. However, narratives have technical correlations and conceptual progressive relationships. For instance, MCP (Model Context Protocol) and A2A (Agent-to-Agent) interaction standards in AI Infra are actually a technical underlying reconstruction of the AI Agent narrative. If subsequent narratives can continue the previous hot spot, forming a systematic upgrade linkage and truly precipitating a sustainable value closed loop during the linkage process, it might give birth to a super narrative similar to the DeFi Summer uptrend.
From the current small narrative pattern, the AI infrastructure layer is most likely to achieve a breakthrough first. If underlying technologies like MCP protocol, A2A communication standards, distributed computing power, reasoning, and data networks can be organically integrated, they indeed have the potential to build a super narrative similar to "AI Summer".
That's all.
In summary, understanding the essence of these four parallel gameplay cycles is the key to finding appropriate strategies within their respective rhythms. Undoubtedly, the single "four-year cycle" thinking can no longer keep up with the current market's complexity.
Adapting to the new normal of "multiple gameplay cycles running in parallel" might be the real key to profiting in this bull market.
