Is the four-year cycle theory obsolete? The rules of survival in the new normal of crypto

Original Author: Haotian (X:@tmel0211)

I've just finished chatting with a few bigwigs in the circle, and everyone is discussing the same thing...

The theory of "a four-year cycle" is completely outdated!

If you are still holding on to getting rich, and you are still fantasizing about "a tenfold and hundredfold chance of lying down and winning in a bull market", you may have been completely abandoned by the market. Why？

Because Smart Money has long discovered a secret, the current Crypto is no longer suitable for a set of playing methods, 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 Out, Ten Years of Slow Bull or Foregone

Halving Cycle "Playbook"? It's completely ineffective! BTC has evolved from a "speculation target" to an "institutional asset allocation", and the capital volume and allocation logic of Wall Street, listed companies, and ETFs are not at all the "bull and bear switching" gameplay of retail investors.

What are the key changes? Retail chips are being handed over on a large scale, while institutional funds, represented by MicroStrategy, are frantically entering the market. This fundamental restructuring 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 afford a 3-5 year holding period to wait for BTC's long-term value realization, but what about retail investors? Obviously, it is impossible to have this kind of patience and financial strength.

In my opinion, we are likely to see a BTC super slow bull that lasts for more than a decade. The annualized return is stable in the 20-30% range, but the intraday volatility is significantly reduced, and it is more like a solid growth technology stock. As for what the price cap 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 FieldMEME

Long Cow Theory is actually true, and in the window period of technical narrative expression, MEME narrative will always cooperate with the rhythm of emotion, money and attention to fill the "boring vacuum" of the market.

What is the essence of MEME? It is the speculative vehicle of "instant gratification". No white paper, no technical validation, no roadmap, just a symbol that makes people smile or resonate. From cat and dog culture to political meme, from AI concept packaging to community IP incubation, MEME has evolved into a complete set of "emotional monetization" industry chain.

Sadly, the "short, flat and fast" nature of the MEME has made it a barometer of market sentiment and a reservoir of money. When money is abundant, MEME becomes the preferred testing ground for hot money; When money is scarce, MEME becomes the last speculative haven.

However, the reality is cruel, and the MEME market is evolving from a "grassroots carnival" to a "professional competition". The difficulty for the average retail investor to profit from this high-frequency rotation is increasing exponentially.

There may be fewer and fewer stories of P teenagers sitting down to forge legends, and the admission of studios, scientists, and big families will make this once "slum paradise" involuted.

The long cycle of technological narrative leap forward: the bottom of the valley of death, starting at 10 times in 3 years?

The technical narrative is gone? Inexistent. Innovations with real technical thresholds, such as Layer 2 scaling, ZK technology, AI infra, etc., will take 2-3 years or even longer to see the actual results. Such projects follow the Gartner Hype Cycle, rather than the capital markets' sentiment cycle – there is a fundamental time dislocation between the two.

reason why the technology narrative has been criticized by the market is that it overvalus the project when it is still in the concept stage, and then undervalues it in the "valley of death" when the technology really starts to land. This determines that the value release of technology projects presents a non-linear leap forward characteristic.

For investors with patience and technical judgment, deploying truly valuable technology projects in the "Death Valley" stage may be the best strategy to achieve alpha. But only if you can live with long waiting periods and market grinding, as well as potential cynicism.

Short cycle of innovation small hot spots: 1-3 month window, brewing the main rising wave big narrativeBefore

the formation of the main technical narrative, various small narratives are rapidly rotated, from RWA to DePIN, from AI Agent to AI Infra (MCP+A 2 A), 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 attention scarcity and capital rent-seeking efficiency.

In fact, it is not difficult to find that the typical mini-narrative cycle follows a six-stage model: "proof-of-concept→ capital exploration→ 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 "funding test" stage, and exit at the peak of "FOMO entry".

The competition between small narratives is essentially a zero-sum game of attention resources. But there is a technical relevance and conceptual progression between narratives. For example, the MCP (Model Context Protocol) protocol and the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) interaction standard in AI Infra are actually the underlying technical reconstructions of the AI Agent narrative. If the follow-up narrative can continue the former hot spots, form a systematic upgrade linkage, and truly precipitate a sustainable value closed loop in the linkage process. It is likely that a mega-narrative will emerge with a major upswing similar to DeFi Summer.

Judging from the existing small narrative pattern, the AI infrastructure level is the most likely to be the first to achieve a breakthrough. If the underlying technologies such as the MCP protocol, A2A communication standard, distributed computing power, inference, and data network can be organically integrated, they do have the potential to build a super narrative similar to "AI Summer".

Above.

In general, it is important to recognize the essence of these four parallel play cycles in order to find the right strategy in their respective rhythms. Needless to say, a single "four-year cycle" mentality is no longer able to keep up with the complexity of the current market.

Adapting to the new normal of "multi-play cycle parallelism" may be the key to real profit in this bull market.

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