Diamond Hands Epilogue: Four Copycat Targets I’m Optimistic About

Author: Lao Bai Source: @Wuhuoqiu

I haven't written the Diamond Hand series for two years. Today is the third edition, and it is also likely to be the last edition of the Diamond Hand series. Because in this cycle of the currency circle, except for the BTC Diamond Hand reward, other diamonds are basically ruthlessly poured. The previous Diamond Hand series also tended to look for Alpha, and this issue is biased towards Beta. After all, some Alphas were cut to pieces after drilling, which is really a painful past.

The biggest Beta is of course the super three BTC + ETH, SOL, BNB. As for the copycat Beta, I personally am currently optimistic about the following four and plan to continue drilling.

1. AAVE - AAVE is one of the few targets that you can hold for a long time and sleep well besides the top three. TVL has broken the previous high of more than 30 billion. What's more commendable is that there has not been a major security accident in all these years. You see that traditional financial institutions such as JP Morgan are testing the blockchain, and they all choose AAVE first to test something

This wave of RWA+ stablecoins, the combination of blockchain and traditional finance, improves efficiency quickly, efficiently and economically, and is destined to be the first major direction for the future development of blockchain. In addition to the public chain, the certainty of Uniswap/Curve is not that high. AAVE is the leading target that is sure to be on the train. The launch of V4 in the next few months is also quite anticipated, so it is worth a try

2. Pendle - TVL is already 6 billion, close to the previous high, one meter stable, and is about to usher in the third wave

Pendle's first wave was backed by Sushiswap and some Defi protocols, splitting out the benefits of liquidity mining, but there was no noise and heat, because those benefits were really virtual

The second wave was the previous wave of LST/LRT based on Lido and Eigenlayer, which soared to the sky. After all, the benefits are really a lot

The future third wave will be a wave of RWA and stablecoins. Income grading and risk splitting are extremely important tracks in traditional finance, and the market is huge (10 trillion + level). With more and more RWA and stablecoin assets on the chain, this track will surely rise with the tide. Unlike AAVE, which at least faces competition from Compound, Morpho, etc., Pendle is basically the only one in this track. You can't even see its competitors with a telescope. The only thing that makes me unhappy is that the coin price is too stable, with little fluctuation. Let's wait and see for a few months. 3. Hyperliquid - The strongest player in this cycle's coin issuance project, no doubt about it. The crushing user experience + crushing transaction depth of Perps on other chains has led to a crushing lead in transaction volume and crushing lead in market value. Moreover, Hyperliquid is not positioned as a Perp, but as a Liquidity Layer on the chain. The recent access of Phantom is the best proof of this. In the future, more front-ends will connect to Hyperliquid, the liquidity backend. In addition to the large-scale buying and repurchase every day, there is also the HyperEVM ecosystem building, HIP-3's RWA Perp and other back-ups are accumulating momentum.

But Hyper is the only diamond holder of mine who has not yet opened a position, the reason is that I sold all the airdrops from 4 to 10, and now I feel a little resentful + can't make a move when I see the market value of nearly 50 billion. I hope to find a good opportunity in the future. I must drill, or I can wait for the next bear market to drill...

4. Bittensor - I used to be a hater on Bittensor, until recently I figured it out and started to be a fan, and I plan to drill it for 6-12 months

The reason for the hater is naturally its PMF. I started to doubt it in 2023, and I still doubt it now. I always feel that Bittensor is very similar to Filecoin

Filecoin If there is no real business demand, it will be filled with garbage data. Bittensor has no real business demand, so it creates demand by itself, and then miners roll up a useless inference result. Last year, many miners colluded with Validator to get the emission of Rumor and other dramas...

So no matter how you look at it, you feel that this thing is like Filecoin

Why did you figure it out recently?

First of all, Crypto has disproven a lot of tracks and confirmed two tracks in this cycle

The confirmed tracks are finance (Defi, RWA, stablecoins are all counted), and Gamble (meme, PolyMarket, and various forms of on-chain Casino are all counted)

Of the few that are still self-proving, Crypto+AI is definitely the largest, and even if this track cannot be confirmed in the short and medium term, it is difficult to completely disprove it.

Among all the current AI+Crypto projects, the most difficult to disprove is Bittensor

There are several reasons for this

1. It ranks first in market value, and Mindshare is also first in this field. When you think of Crypto+AI, the first thing you think of is definitely it

2. At this stage, very few people can fully explain what Bittensor does. If you don’t believe it, try to imagine yourself spending 10 minutes introducing Bittensor to a friend. Can you explain it clearly?

3. There are nearly 100 subnets now, and it shouldn’t be a problem to have 200 or 300 subnets next year. Some subnets actually have PMF+ and revenue (although most of the clients are Web3 projects, and that little revenue is negligible compared to the market value of Bittensor)…

4. Bittensor will be halved in January and February next year. It has a hard cap of 21 million like BTC, and it will be halved every 4 years or so. Next year’s halving will definitely be a big event.

In terms of emission mechanism and Mindshare, this thing can be seen as BTC in the AIxCrypto track. And in terms of subnet design, consensus and proof mechanism, it is like ETH - maybe some star subnet will come out with something that really has PMF, just like Uniswap and AAVE on ETH. After all, its subnets cover everything from decentralized training, to data, to computing power, to reasoning, to text, images, video, drug research, blah blah blah. Basically, all the AI+Crypto sub-fields you can think of have one or several sub-networks doing things. So compared to other projects, Bittensor is more like the underlying platform of ETH, especially after the subnet can issue its own coins this year.

But the biggest problem of Bittensor is also its high market value. It emits more than one million U every day. It is still quite difficult to digest at this stage. If you think it is expensive, you can pay attention to it in the first half of next year. You can drill or not drill at present.

OK, the Diamond Hand series is completely over. Come back next year and the year after to see if this last version of Diamond Hand can outperform BTC, so record today's price - BTC-118275, AAVE - 312.7, Pendle - 4.43, Hyper - 44, TAO- 433