Insightful chart on VC funding trends: Just two years ago, infra took 50.9% of investment capital. By H1 2026, it dropped to 14.8%, as payments and stablecoins, CEXs, and prediction markets took the lead. DeFi still stays relevant, but $MORPHO alone accounts for 17.7% of all DeFi investment in H1 2026.

Five playbooks to still make money in crypto: 1. Invest in revenue generating tokens Probably the simplest to execute: just buy tokens where value distribution to token holders (relative to MC) matters most. Some plays: $HYPE, $TRX, $SKY, $JUP. Simple but not easy as $PUMP despite huge buybacks failed to rally. 2. Narrative trading In previous cycles yielded great returns as crypto was experimental and traded mostly on hype and story telling Now, the market demands revenue and clear PMF but opportunities still exist: $ZEC is the biggest win this cycle. I'd put memecoins in this section too as they trade purely on attention e.g., Robinhood memes 3. Yield Farming Yields are compressed and risks due to AI hacking have increased. Still, more sophisticated players can be tradfi returns and emergence of 'vault managers' and Risk Curators make it easy for retail to participate too. 4. Bet on institutional adoption. I believe it's still a trade that takes time to play out as current upside is absorb by equity holders that retail can't access: Circle's IPO is a clear example where retail was left behind. Securitized SPAC is another. Tokens like $STABLE (scam) or Canton's $CC shows appetite for the narrative. $TEMPO & $ARC TGEs will be the ones to watch. Also, $FLUID just announced partnership with Kinetic to build a permissioned, KYC'd instance of Fluid for institutions is unique as Kinetic will acquire 10% of $FLUID on the open market. Tokenization is big part of institutional adoption and I like Backpack's $BP here despite the recent pump. Need more ideas for institutional adoption. 5. Airdrop farming... ... has become industrialized for a while now. Still, I bet on successful TGE of Variational's $VAR Major catalyst for airdrop revival would be Polymarket. Their TGE could spread beyond CT and juicy airdrops could bring a new retail wave to crypto. --- Any other strategies I missed?

Bullish selling if: - selling gets $MSTR into the S&P 500 S&P Global wanted proof they can raise cash during a 'Bitcoin stress'. Well, now they have it. And if inclusion happens, every boomer and VWCE investor buys MSTR passively every month. Strategy then can buy back all that BTC.

Btw, $TRX still trading near ATHs while outperforming BTC and obv $ETH While all other chains are fighting on which offers the lowest fees, Tron reached PMF and monetized it via HIGH transfer fees (costing up to $3.5 USD) So, Tron generates more in fees than all other L1s combined ($3b vs $296m for Solana and $291m for Ethereum). Lesson here.

Bullish selling if: - selling gets $MSTR into the S&P 500 S&P Global wanted proof they can raise cash during a 'Bitcoin stress'. Well, now they have it. And if inclusion happens, every boomer and VWCE investor buys MSTR passively every month. Strategy then can buy back all that BTC.

Btw, $TRX still trading near ATHs while outperforming BTC and obv $ETH While all other chains are fighting on which offers the lowest fees, Tron reached PMF and monetized it via HIGH transfer fees (costing up to $3.5 USD) So, Tron generates more in fees than all other L1s combined ($3b vs $296m for Solana and $291m for Ethereum). Lesson here.

Only Ethereum managed to run a16z's Progressive Decentralization playbook: EF is exiting to the public via selling ETH And new foundations are taking over some of EF's tasks. While DAOs are moving the opposite direction: centralization WHILE they are selling tokens.

Saylor could've been the countercyclical force for BTC: sell some into pumps, buy back the dips. Sure, bull runs might end lower but bottoms also shallower. Instead his structure amplifies volatility both ways. The NAV premium only lets him buy when BTC pumps, and fixed dividends force him to sell the lows. Volatility is great for SOME traders. But BTC's pitch to institutions is that it calms down as it matures. The biggest holder is making it worse.

Preparation for Next Cycle. This bear is fundamentally different. Nobody reads whitepapers anymore. Projects don't write them either. But now we have killer apps (perps, PMs) & revenue generators. Here's Ignas's take:

I think bringing back trenches means 1) making early believers & users rich and 2) spreading that message beyond CT. KOL memecoins are zero sum game where CT degens play in the casino. But it mainly stays within our own circle. So new people will join when some unique opportunities arise that end up on mainstream news Something like polymarket making many new rich with HUGE airdrop. It could be a disbelief story on Bloomberg to people who never heard of ‘airdrop’ Or a general crypto market recovery that would bring back FOMO. Saying that, KOL memecoins could still ‘bring back the trenches’ if it instills bullish sentiment in crypto natives who still hold onto their stablecoins. The first sign of that would be huge $SOL outperformance but $SOL started outperforming when this kol meme meta started. (Ironically, $ETH is looking good and more serious bet). Lastly, HYPE was perhaps the most successful ‘trenches’ story this cycle with so many ‘ new rich’. But even it likely only instilled FOMO into farming other perp dexes. In other words, trenches stay localized and we need something TOTALLY new to really bring back the trenches. Not something old that has tainted track record.

Bullish for $ETH... if only the EF shipped on time. The Merge was 'six months away' for about four years, so worth price in delays. But this path is super sexy as it addresses all (except one) key feedback: L1 takes execution back from L2s, privacy, quantum resistance and finality in seconds. The missing part is perhaps $ETH tokenomics... although non-issue if reduced fees attract more txs/users. Big IF. Most exciting parts come in 2028+ and Finality by 2029. If bear market continues for longer, buying ETH dips is seductive but each delay is bearish for ETH as competitors like Tempo, Canton etc. are coming after Ethereum's RWA/institutional adoption lunch.

Robinhood launched using Arbitrum tech, joining the Arbitrum stack (Orbit). Yet $ARB has only barely bounced back from its ATL 7 days ago. Massive win for Arbitrum from technical, reputational, and BD perspective but also from liquidity via Orbit but market doesn't care. Years ago this would've pumped $ARB significantly. But market now requires fruits from this partnership, ideally increased fees that accrue to $ARB. At least Robinhood paid $1M to Arbitrum’s Open House 2026 program. It's also a win for Ethereum: Instead of Robinhood building their own corpo-slop L1, Robinhood stays within the Ethereum ecosystem with some fees being routed to the L1. So Ethereum L2 roadmap didn't go to waste despite liquidity fragmentation and worse UX in the short run.

Securitize went public via a SPAC and immediately tokenized its stock to trade onchain. I wrote on my blog that I wouldn't farm it, despite Securitize being the No. 1 RWA platform with $4B in distributed value vs Ondo's $3.7B in 2nd place. (though $BUIDL alone is $2.2B, and my main interest is tokenized stocks, where Securitize ranks 3rd) No token means nothing to farm, but tokenizing the equity right after the IPO makes it a more interesting play. $GLXY went a similar way. No token also means clear ownership and none of the token<>equity dilemma that $VVV suffers from now. But a token is an amazing fundraising tool and, what matters to me, a way to reward loyal users. $VVV had a juicy airdrop for early users (thanks for that), but post TGE the token is a nuisance: e-begooors keep complaining and the team burns energy on them. What we're seeing now is another path: - Backpack airdropped $BP but gives equity access to anyone staking the token for a year - Kast invited its most active users to receive equity instead of points So there's a way to reward users with equity. Securitize just didn't do it. After years of zero tokenomics innovation, new models are emerging that balance the token (fundraising, rewards, utility) with equity (ownership). Not an easy balance to strike. I wouldn't be surprised if investors end up preferring one asset only. Ownership tokens, MetaDAO style. Or tokenized equity. I still like tokens though. The airdrop is still the purest early-user reward, even when the real value sits in the equity.

Token in a dual equity<>token set up is mainly a fundraising tool. After the fundraising token becomes a nuisance, annoyance and distraction but teams add some utility to keep holders quiet. Tired of it. Tokens need to be ownership assets and not extraction tools.

$SOL does look good: - Tokenized equity growth - Payments - (New) prediction markets via Phantom make it more user friendly - Reducing $SOL inflation + SIMD-547 proposal adding a new resource-based base fee to burn -> Could make $SOL deflationary Solana just needs to get rid of extractive memecoin KOLs/narrative and push it as true trading chain. Big plus if they managed to grow perps but this can wait as Hyperliquid is too strong for now.

I couldn’t care less if Circle’s USDC lost dominance and went to zero. Crypto natives were the ones making it successful but got no airdrops, no IPO allocation or anything. If Open USD via Plasma, Tempo etc throw billions in incentives via liquidity mining to grow $OUSD MC, then it’s better for us - higher yields. Bring on stablecoin wars

How does one prepare for the next bull if you are still bullish on crypto? When I started actively writing on Twitter four years ago, things were different. Like now, it was a bear market, but back then, CT believed with certainty that a new bull run would arrive. Notably, a bull run in altcoins. BTC was boring, and the upside seemed limited. Ethereum's modular roadmap seemed exciting, with potential sharding not in the trash bin just yet. Solana was written off (before a monolithic vs. modular narrative reemerged with the $SOL revival). To build an edge, one believed in learning about new technical crypto innovations before anyone else so they could ride a narrative when the general crowd caught up. No surprise that technical breakdown posts of narratives did amazingly well on X: Proof of humanity, soulbound tokens, quadratic voting... anyone care to learn lol? Maker initiated Endgame Plan for Unbiased World Currency. They did the exact opposite of it (to be fair, pro crypto regulation changed their roadmap). VCs were heavily deploying, ready to replay the previous bull run playbook. Even KOLs were playing VCs, getting in at lower valuations than VCs in exchange for a few posts on X. Liquidity mining in liquid tokens was still popular. Now replaced by points. LP mining is basically dead. Dead as #hashtags# on X. Overall, reviewing my old posts, it's clear that this bear market is fundamentally different. CT is unwilling to learn anything technical. Nobody reads or cares about white papers. In turn, projects don't even have or share roadmaps: announcements come straight from the sky and bag holders don't scream "can devs do anything" anymore. Price decline is seen as a natural state of affairs. No one to blame but you (or CZ). Discords and projects' TG channels are dead. We believed that crypto-native innovation would bring us mass adoption the moment that a "killer crypto app" appears. Indeed! This turned out to be true: prediction markets, onchain perps, and RWA/stock tokenization are those killer apps. Even more bullish is that revenue, especially that which goes to holders, matters more than empty roadmaps. Yet besides $HYPE (and maybe $ZEC), there were no true token success stories this cycle ($SOL revival could be one more). The high hopes for altcoin season were exploited by memecoin overprinting and low-float, high-FDV launches. If reading whitepapers or technical threads on CT is not your thing, the 'research on your own' part still matters. Simply daily checking dashboards on Defillama, Blockworks, Artemis, etc., for high-revenue projects will put you ahead, as you can whitelist those tokens for more bullish times. I'm also not giving up on new TGEs and airdrops: following new projects that manage to raise decent amounts from VCs in this terrible market must have something up their sleeves. I bet launching at high FDVs in a bullish market will make a comeback (thus juicy airdrops). (Praying for Variational's $VAR stimmy). Then don't forget to try out new apps: anything trending on CT is worth five minutes of your time: Download the app, put a few USD in, and see if it clicks with your degen senses. Finally, regulation is a big variable this time around: The Clarity Act in the US (if passed) could give revival to some select altcoins while others might suffer. Equally, the EU's MiCA regulation for CEXs is already changing the CEX competition: if Binance is out, then it gives someone else an advantage. (Not gonna lie, I like Backpack's $BP as a proxy trade for the EU regulation plus tokenized stocks on the Solana narrative.) In any case, researching isn't dead. We are just researching real products now instead of trading on pure whitepapers and technical narratives. Which should make things even easier this time as very few actually match the criteria.

Ethereum txs reaching ATH due to address poisoning attacks. Every time the gas limit is raised and tx fees go down, it costs less to 'dust' a wallet. For example, after Fusaka, sub-$0.01 dust txs increased by 600%. Etherscan reported that Ethereum address poisoning succeeds about 0.01% of the time: 1 in 10,000 transfers tricks a user into sending funds to an attacker. Actually, Ethereum might benefit from RAISING fees as they it makes address poisoning attacks more expensive and it burns more $ETH.

Bullish for multiple assets: $ONDO $CFG $PENDLE $HYPE ... Also lending markets that accept tokenized collateral: $AAVE $MORPHO $FLUID ... And I bet xStocks and Securitize private sale investors are happy with this. But it benefits all crypto.

Finally seeing 0-to-1 mechanics in crypto again. Feels like since 2022 we've recycled similar models, but a few apps are actually building new mechanics this cycle: - @papertrade_xyz: $PAPER mints when you lose trades, and the LP grows from those losses. Fair launch is great. - @Euphoria_fi: tap-to-trade derivatives that are actually fun to play. Mobile-first contrasts with PC-optimized old DeFi apps. Gotta try before having an opinion. - @hitdotone: 666x leverage but... on a random direction. - @apyx_fi: stablecoin yield comes from preferred-equity dividends paid by public companies like MSTR. What other apps with actual new mechanics did I miss? Priority for tokenless projects.