Followin' the CES2025 event, which is dubbed the tech industry's Spring Festival Gala, NVIDIA once again became a focal point. Huang Renxun showcased a series of products, including:
- Project DIGITS (a $3,000 personal supercomputer with 1,000 times the performance of a regular laptop)
- The new RTX Blackwell series (including the RTX 5090)
- NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 (a data center superchip with 72 Blackwell GPUs)
- NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Blueprint (a synthetic motion generation simulation workflow)
- Thor Blackwell (the next-generation automotive processor)
- NVIDIA Cosmos (an open-source, open-weight video world base model)
Huang Renxun also predicted that Robotaxis and Self-Driving will become the first industry worth trillions of dollars, and NVIDIA will collaborate with Toyota to produce the next generation of self-driving cars. They also plan to deploy autonomous trucks on a large scale by 2027.
In contrast to the tech industry's excitement, the crypto market seems to have kept many people awake at night. According to on-chain data, in the past 24 hours, 176,564 people were liquidated, with a total liquidation amount of $562 million, mainly from long positions, reaching $504 million.
Some partners in the group have also conducted new reviews and reflections on the recent market conditions, which is a good thing. Trading is a serious matter, and we should manage our positions while quickly controlling our emotions.
While many have been complaining about the market, this situation may need to be viewed comprehensively. From the price perspective, BTC has risen from around $15,000 to around $108,000, and ETH has risen from around $800 to a high of around $4,100. From the development perspective, after years of failure, spot ETFs were finally approved last year (2024), and the inflow of funds into BTC ETFs and ETH ETFs has been constantly setting new historical records. With the participation of large institutions like BlackRock and MicroStrategy, as well as the pro-crypto US President Trump, the crypto industry has become a recognized industry, and Bitcoin may even be included in more countries' strategic reserve plans in the near future.
Although the market may continue to face various problems in the short term, we are very optimistic about the long-term development of the crypto market.
This bull market has been described by many as the "most difficult bull market to make money in history." This view is understandable, as the majority of the price increases in this bull market seem to have been driven by external macroeconomic factors, rather than internal innovations.
Regarding the lack of innovation, we believe that this may not be the fundamental problem, and the core reason for the market fluctuations may be the gradual qualitative change in the overall sentiment. In the past, the crypto market was a completely wild growth industry, full of aggressive ideas and high-risk gaming, with the slogan of blockchain changing (or even revolutionizing) the real world. Now, with the popularization and promotion of ETFs, the deeper participation and adoption of traditional large institutions, and the continuous regulatory follow-up of government departments, more and more people are returning to investment rationality, rather than pursuing the traditional "crypto circle" aggressive ideas and high-risk.
Vitalik (V神)'s thinking has always been ahead of the curve, as he mentioned in a previous blog post a broader vision: "We are not here just to create isolated tools and games, but rather to build holistically toward a more free and open society and economy, where the different parts - technological, social and economic - fit into each other."
However, Vitalik's personal vision seems to have diverged somewhat from ETH's vision, and it is clear that the current ETH has lost some of its original ambition, and Ethereum seems to have offloaded some of its original vision to L2.
As for whether AI belongs to innovation, I do not deny that. The point I made earlier was that the internal innovation engine of the crypto industry is currently slowing down, but I did not say that the crypto industry has no innovation at all. If we had to summarize a relatively representative and convincing innovation for this cycle, the AI x Crypto concept would likely be in an important position.
Reviewing the past few years, we can clearly see that the AI concept has been hot several times. First, in late 2022, the global popularity of ChatGPT sparked a craze for large AI models. Subsequently, tokens related to the AI concept began to be hyped and their prices started to rise, with the emergence of various AI concept memecoins. Then, around September-October 2023, as the new bull market was approaching, the AI narrative became one of the representative sectors that started to rise.
Reflecting on the past few years of AI x Crypto hype, we can actually find that AI is more of an external innovation. This can also be seen from the stock price performance of NVIDIA over the past 5 years, which has increased by 2,193.62%.
In other words, if the current bull market is not driven by external innovative AI concepts, further igniting the concept of AI x Crypto, the crypto market may also lack a lot of fun, and there will be fewer MemeCoins (although the vast majority will go to zero) gameplay and concepts. Moreover, MemeCoin seems to be one of the core narratives in the current bull market that can still maintain the original "crypto" wild growth, because the only use of MemeCoin is Gaming, and this crypto-specific get-rich-quick (or zero) model seems to have not been too disturbed and interfered by external factors.
Apart from (AI x Crypto), in this cycle we don't seem to have seen too many innovations that can continue to be hot, such as the Bitcoin inscription ecology concept like BRC20, which was only hot twice, and the Runes concept has not even appeared on the large-scale explosion that people originally imagined, and many other so-called new concepts (innovations) even disappeared in less than 2 weeks. In contrast, in the previous bull market cycle, we could see a lot of internal innovations, such as DeFi, Non-Fungible Token, GameFi (P2E), and Metaverse.
In short, the ICO boom in 2017 can be considered an internal innovation, the DeFi in 2020 (including various token economic models with more innovative significance, liquidity Mining, algorithmic stablecoins, etc.) can be considered an internal innovation, and in the current cycle, the vast majority of projects no longer pursue internal innovation, nor do they pursue a vision that can change the world, they are more willing to issue tokens to harvest the new investors through simple Copy (or pseudo-innovation).
However, as long as there are opportunities for speculation, this field will continue to attract people with dreams of getting rich quickly to join in endlessly, even though there are higher risks and more dark forest rules (survival of the fittest, old hands making money from new hands) here.
Perhaps we are now experiencing some bubbles, or facing even bigger bubbles, and also experiencing the slowdown or even stagnation of the internal innovation engine, but the wheels of history are definitely moving forward, and maybe in the not-too-distant future, after the so-called bubble bursts, at least 1-2 killer applications can be precipitated and continue to drive the industry's development, as for who will have the last laugh, we don't know, we can only leave it to the market and time to verify.
If you are just speculating in this field and are not optimistic about the future development of this field, then you are free to "Game" however you want, as long as you can bear the risks you may face. If you hope to grow with the crypto field, then you should be patient and pay more attention to narratives or projects with long-term development vision, and you don't even need to go far, the simplest way is to hold BTC, or you can directly choose the projects you are most optimistic about from the top 100 market cap, just to give a few examples:
Chainlink, ranked 13th in market cap, if the blockchain wants to connect with the real world, it cannot do without oracles, and Chainlink has a good foundation and advantages in this niche.
Uniswap, ranked 20th in market cap, the acceptance of DEX by the public has become higher and higher, as the DEX with the highest market share, Uniswap can be compared to the "excellent company" in the traditional financial field.
AAVE, ranked 31st in market cap, the project is currently the leader in the lending field, occupying more than 60% of the market share, and is a project that major institutions are optimistic about, why don't you look up to it?
Ethena, ranked 46th in market cap, as a synthetic dollar protocol, it has fully transparent on-chain support, integrating DeFi, CeFi and TradFi.
Pudgy Penguins, ranked 53rd in market cap, this project was quite hot in 2023 and was even called the "new NFT king" at the time, because it was able to buck the trend when the entire NFT market was sluggish, and became a high-profile project, and is now expanding its Web3 IP brand to Web2.
WorldCoin, ranked 60th in market cap, this project was hot for a while after its launch, but later also generated a lot of controversy, such as privacy issues, using the Orb device to scan people's eyes (irises) is a very aggressive move, but if this project can succeed in the future, the commercial price may be revolutionary.
Arweave, ranked 94th in market cap, people don't discuss the topic of permanent storage as much now, but this field actually has underlying demand, and in terms of applications, Arweave's landing and real adoption at least seem to be doing relatively well.
Of course, we have just randomly selected a few projects from the top 100 market cap for demonstration, you need to do targeted research based on your own preferences, and the above content is not investment advice.
3. How long can the heat of AI agents last?
Let's go back to the AI topic and continue to talk about AI agents. From the on-chain data, the performance of AI agents has been ranked first in the past 30 days, indicating the heat.
I remember that in the past, some people in the workplace were always shouting the slogan of innovation, innovating for the sake of innovation, but in the end they were still accumulating bricks in the original place, and most people actually didn't break out of their inherent thinking circles. This seems to be similar to the currently hottest AI Agents in the crypto market.
According to on-chain data, there are at least 1,000 projects related to AI Agents, of which about 100 or more projects (tokens) have relatively active trading, and the total market cap of Agents-related tokens has already exceeded $15 billion. As shown in the figure below.
As usual, as soon as a concept (narrative) is hot, new tokens related to it will sprout like mushrooms after the rain, and now tokens based on the ai16z, Virtual and Swarms ecosystems (frameworks) are still growing rapidly, and scams based on the Agents concept are also obviously increasing, the risks can be said to be greater and greater. If you still want to catch this train now, then you can't be blindly, you must do the research we mentioned in the article: don't touch it if you don't understand.
Before participating in any Agents-related projects, you should do some necessary research, such as:
- Enter the TG to see the real discussion situation through the project's website.
- Find the GitHub entrance through the website and check if the file quantity or code situation is reasonable, such as trying to avoid projects that upload code in the "Add files via upload" way, and the update records do not have detailed description information (you can search for tutorials on using the GitHub platform by yourself on Google/YouTube).
- Search on social platforms to see how the topic discussion of the corresponding project is, and whether others have any comments.
- Check the token's chip distribution, whether a small number of wallets hold most of the chips, whether the top 100 holding wallets are mostly newly created wallets, etc.
In short, you need to try to understand this project from the dimensions you are more interested in, rather than blindly buying in.
As for how long the current AI Agents issuance boom that started around last November can last, we don't know, maybe it will last until the end of the first quarter of this year. But it can be foreseen that after the heat of AI Agents subsides, most of such tokens will go to zero like MemeCoin, because apart from a lot of scam tokens (such as those packaged on the surface as smart agents, but are actually operated by people behind the scenes), the remaining majority are also chat bots with meme and social attributes, without real technical innovation. But in the end, at least 1-2 awesome projects will definitely emerge.
This field is like this, with various heat (hype) coming and going, cutting one after another, but this does not affect people's enthusiasm to participate, because people's eyes can only see the increase (being pumped), in fact, any popular narrative is the same, most of the people who run in after the heat comes up will eventually become the bagholders.
This market has never lacked the so-called hot (hype) topics, if AI Agents' heat goes down one day, perhaps the new heat combination of AI + DeFi and others will continue to take over.
