Looking For The Next Big Crypto Thing

It’s a long time ago that I wrote a piece here saying dogecoin was going to be big. So long I had to look up the price of doge back on July 23, 2018.

It was roughly 0.3 cents, now its 15c and at the high, care of Elon Musk, it went over 65c. This is what crypto is all about, massive gains from nothing but a crazy idea. (For disclosure I sold my million Doge for a whole bitcoin, so I did OK but not OooohKay.)

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The trouble with bitcoin is, these days it will simply not go up 45x like doge, at least not in real terms. The only way it might is if the dollar collapses to a fraction of its current value. This is not impossible but the 100x crypto denizens dream of in terms of capital increase is no longer a possibility outside of pumpers’ deliriums. Bitcoin
Bitcoin
is not going there, not ever.

So to be a real crypto “degen” playing to get rich quick you have to look at the new meme coins that pop up with regularity, and frankly that is pure gambling. What is needed to get a big win from something “real” is to find something new, something fresh, something exciting that is actually going to be something and develop into a community or ecosystem.

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To me when I look at what is going on there is a distinct lack of “new.” This is not really a surprise as the crypto world is busy copying old ideas and is hemmed in by US regulation bent on playing whack-a-mole with any projects looking like unicorns. You don’t have to be on the FTX spectrum to get slammed by the regulator, you can be Coinbase or Uniswap
Uniswap
and now even previously cleared Ethereum
Ethereum
is under a cloud. No crypto outfit seems to be safe from being run out on a rail, so it’s not surprising that innovation has been significantly stifled.

So cue protests about “project A” or “project B” whose supporters will say are innovative and awesome and counter examples. However, I feel these kinds of projects are thin on the ground, especially so when you look at the past. What is more, when new projects get listed they are often ‘valued’ at hundreds of millions of dollars in terms of their tokens’ valuations and supply and in reality the projects themselves are little more than wishful business plans with a handful of devs.

So what to do?

Keep looking for opportunities is the simple answer, they will come.

For me the most exciting development is back in bitcoin-land and rather than being part of the Ethereum explosion, it is technology getting strapped on to the master blockchain of BTC.

Last year it was the arrival of ordinals and now we have the next generation of the idea and technology, runes. Surprisingly I got given a runestone (without asking or even knowing I had one) because I had been minting ordinals like crazy. As an art collector I had been drawn into NFTs but I was late to the game, missing those cheap Punks and Apes, but nonetheless I ended up with a few NFTs and if you have the collector gene you know how a certain kind of junk has an irresistible allure. To me NFTs are all about the digital generation and its oneness with all things digital. It might have been a baseball card or a stamp for my generation but for the young generation a bitmap is just as potent, perhaps more so. Yet like dogecoin, the 45x-ness of NFTs is over, a Crypto Punk likewise is never going to have a floor price of £5m unless hyperinflation makes it so.

What is needed is the new, ‘new, new’ thing and for me that is runes.

Runes are akin to NFTs on bitcoin and as I write there is still power-law growth potential in a rune. Which rune? That is yet to be revealed, but the game is on. The point is, it’s a champagne or nothing situation because runes will either catch or they won’t. Likewise, ordinals are still in play and might go nova or die on the vine.

Either are worth watching because after a bit of focus you will be amongst a small group of people with a feel for the ecosystem and whether it will take off or not.

While bitcoin or any of the other established names will never go exponential again in the same way as it did in the past, there will be new crypto categories that come along that start miniscule then blow up massively. As such, that is where we need to look and it’s simply a discipline to keep scouring the crypto investment shore to find the next opportunity before too many others catch a glimpse. Right now, the latest potential monster egg is runes and it is hatching now. There will be others.