Title: Everything before this was just noise—now the real bull cycle begins

Author: hitesh.eth

Compiled by: Asher, Odaily

Recently, the price correction of BTC has led to a significant decline in Altcoins across almost all sectors, with some sectors even experiencing extreme pullbacks. According to ROOTDATA data on February 8, since BTC's first correction on December 17, 2024, the AI Agent sector has seen the largest decline of 72.41%, followed by the MEME sector at 59.24%, the GameFi sector at 56.96%, and the Non-Fungible Token sector at 54.8%. The pullback in other categories has also exceeded 40%.

Data source: RootData

Perhaps when the bubble bursts and the market has gone through a round of washing, the real buy the dips opportunity will quietly arrive. According to the chart analysis published by analyst PlanB, all Bitcoin profits have appeared in the red periods (i.e., the six months before the halving to the eighteen months after the halving) in the chart, while the blue periods have been all losses. We are currently in the red period, and the bull market is expected to last until October (from February).

PlanB's BTC analysis chart

Furthermore, from a macro perspective, the real bull cycle of crypto may just be starting.

In this article, hitesh.eth analyzed the vision of the crypto community and discussed the two possible paths the crypto market may face in the future: one is the anarchic state full of speculation and freedom, and the other is the gradually strengthening regulation and control. As the market develops and technology progresses, these two paths will become increasingly clear, and the real bull cycle may be about to begin.

The following is the original content (edited for better readability):

Crypto Should Have Been an Anarchic Experiment

The emergence of crypto technology was not accidental. Its development has spanned decades, with thousands of cryptographers driving this process, aiming to build a truly decentralized crypto society. In this society, legal identity would no longer be a necessity, and everyone could maintain anonymity, with governance, currency, communication, interaction, and collaboration entirely driven by crypto technology, without any authority restrictions.

In such a world, people could freely create markets, trade without constraints, and wealth would truly belong to individuals, with the tax system losing control. The power institutions and banking system, which have long controlled the economy, have long been mired in corruption, and the carefully constructed illusion has made it difficult for people to realize that they are already in a cage.

The Awakening Voice of Bitcoin

The emergence of Bitcoin has pointed the way for the development of the crypto anarchic society. It has provided an alternative to the traditional financial system, enabling individuals to independently control their wealth without relying on banks or governments. Money has, for the first time, achieved true decentralization, with censorship resistance, transparency, and no need for permission.

In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin whitepaper, which was not only a technological breakthrough but also an ideological revolution. It shook the foundations of the centralized monetary system, revealing the flaws of governments and financial elites manipulating fiat currencies, marking an important step in breaking the long-term economic oppression.

Subsequently, Ethereum built a comprehensive development infrastructure, fully exploring the application scenarios of blockchain technology, and drove the first wave of the crypto anarchic era.

Tokenization of Everything

The crypto anarchic society requires infrastructure to support tokenization, allowing everything that can be expressed in words or images to be tokenized and establishing liquidity markets around them.

This vision was proposed as early as 1988 by the legendary cypherpunk Timothy May in the "Crypto Anarchist Manifesto." He envisioned a world empowered by crypto tools, where privacy, freedom, and individual sovereignty could be realized, no longer under the control of oppressive institutions. May described how crypto communication, anonymous transactions, and decentralized systems could make oppressive institutions irrelevant. This manifesto became the ideological foundation of Bitcoin and the broader crypto movement, inspiring developers and thinkers to view cryptography as the ultimate tool for human liberation.

Putting aside price fluctuations and focusing on the essence of market development, we can find that a key liquidity-driving mechanism - Bonding Curve - was unlocked last year. This mechanism can create liquidity markets for various text-based concepts. In the image domain, Non-Fungible Tokens have already explored this in the previous cycle. The current experimental direction is to create as many liquidity markets as possible to meet different needs.

MEME Coins Are the Market

On the surface, creating MEME coins means creating seemingly meaningless liquidity markets, but the core is creating markets, assuming that some people like to speculate on "X" and providing them with the opportunity to enter the on-chain to profit from it.

In this speculative process, people will form beliefs around certain things, which come from the theories or data they adopt. So, in fact, we are building liquidity markets for various tokenized beliefs.

The Wild West of Crypto Anarchy

In the state of crypto anarchy, people can trade opinions, trends, stories, articles, songs, memes, research papers, reputations, gossip, comments, recipes, and many other things that are currently unimaginable - it's all crazy.

As written in the "Crypto Anarchist Manifesto," this stage will eventually be reached, and we now have the infrastructure to support various wild liquidity markets, but the current problem is that most markets are exploited by powerful participants who want to consolidate their existing profits.

Solving the problem of fair incentive distribution in liquidity markets is to create a reputation layer for the crypto anarchic state. At this level, participants can verify the reputation of creators before participating in the market, and creators can also verify the reputation of users before accepting them.

Two Paths for the Future

The crypto market is currently at a critical stage, facing two possible paths, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. The first path leads to more speculation and freedom, bringing an ever-evolving crypto anarchic state. In this state, new markets will constantly emerge, and wealth will be repeatedly earned and lost in speculative cycles, with those who can adapt and act quickly thriving.

The second path means stronger regulation and control, leading to a regulated crypto economy. This will provide stable, compliant, and structured investment opportunities, led by institutions and traditional financial players, offering a more predictable but controlled environment. As the US introduces crypto regulations, the distinction between these two paths will become increasingly clear. The regulated market will focus on "cash cow" projects and real-income-generating Web3 businesses, which will also be the starting point for the first bull cycle under authoritarian control.

The crypto anarchic state, on the other hand, will continue to change rapidly on the fringes. If there are 100 markets, 99 may decline, and one market will absorb the liquidity of all the others. The value of attention will rise, and those who can navigate this landscape will continue to win. In some corner of the crypto anarchic state, there will always be a bull cycle, and the key is to identify and capture the maximum benefit from it.