The four-year cycle is broken. How to invest in cryptocurrency in the new normal?

Author: Haotian

I just finished chatting with several big guys in the circle, and everyone was discussing the same thing...

The theory of "a four-year cycle" is completely outdated!

If you are still holding on to getting rich, and still fantasizing about "a ten-fold or a hundred-fold winning opportunity in a bull market", you may have been completely abandoned by the market. Why?

Because smart money has long discovered a secret: Crypto is no longer applicable to one set of gameplay, but 4 completely different gameplay cycles are running at the same time?: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.

Where are the key changes? Retail investors are handing over their chips on a large scale, while institutional funds represented by MicroStrategy are entering the market frantically. This fundamental reconstruction of the chip structure is redefining BTC's price discovery mechanism and volatility characteristics.

What are retail investors facing? The double squeeze of "time cost" and "opportunity cost". Institutions can withstand a 3-5 year holding period to wait for the long-term value of BTC to be realized, but what about retail investors? Obviously, it is impossible to have such patience and capital layout strength.

In my opinion, we are likely to see a BTC super slow bull that lasts 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 steadily growing technology stock. As for how much the price ceiling of BTC will reach? From the perspective of retail investors now, it is even difficult to predict.

MEME attention short-wave cycle: from slum paradise to professional leek cutting field

MEME long bull theory is actually valid. In the window period of technical narrative expression, MEME narrative will always cooperate with the rhythm of emotions, funds and attention to fill the market's "boring vacuum".

What is the essence of MEME? It is a speculative carrier of "instant gratification". No white paper, no technical verification, no roadmap, 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. The terrible thing is that the "short, flat and fast" characteristics of MEME 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 "grassroots carnival" to "professional competition." The difficulty for ordinary retail investors to make profits in this high-frequency rotation is increasing exponentially.

Stories of young players sitting around and creating legends may become less and less. The entry of studios, scientists, and big players will make this once "slum paradise" involuted.

Technology narrative leaps forward in a long cycle: Death Valley bottom-fishing, 10 times in 3 years?

Has the technology narrative disappeared? It does not exist. Innovations that truly have technical barriers, such as Layer2 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 emotional cycle of the capital market - there is a fundamental time misalignment between the two.

The reason why the technology narrative is criticized by the market is entirely because 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 nonlinear 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 torment, as well as potential cynicism.

Short cycle of innovative small hot spots: 1-3 month window period, brewing the main rising wave narrative

Before the main technical narrative is formed, various small narratives rotate rapidly, from RWA to DePIN, from AI Agent to AI Infra (MCP+A2A), and each small hot spot may only have a window period of 1-3 months.

This narrative fragmentation and high-frequency rotation reflect the dual constraints of the current market's attention scarcity and capital rent-seeking efficiency.

In fact, it is not difficult to find that the typical small narrative cycle follows a six-stage model: "proof of concept → capital trial → public opinion amplification → FOMO entry → valuation overdraft → capital withdrawal". Want to profit in this model?

The key is to enter from the "proof of concept" to the "capital trial" stage and exit at the peak of "FOMO entry".

The competition between small narratives is essentially a zero-sum game of attention resources. However, there is a technical correlation and a progressive relationship between narratives. For example, the MCP (Model Context Protocol) protocol and the A2A (Agent-to-Agent) interaction standard in AI Infra are actually the technical bottom reconstruction of AI Agent narratives. If the 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 rising wave level similar to DeFi Summer will be born.

From the existing small narrative pattern, the AI ​​infrastructure level is most likely to achieve a breakthrough 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".

That's all.

In general, only by recognizing the nature of these four parallel gameplay cycles can we find the right strategy in their respective rhythms. There is no doubt that 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 a profit in this bull market.