Hello friends.
SCROLL DOWN FOR PREDICTIONS. THE START IS ME RANTING ABOUT BORING STUFF YOU PROBABLY DON’T CARE ABOUT.
What a year 2023 has been. In fact, it’s been my favourite year I’ve ever spent in Crypto.
We’ve raced hamsters, bought and sold shares of our friends, won regulatory fights, and most importantly, the number went up.
I re-hit and later surpassed my 2021 portfolio all-time high, made some fantastic friends on the internet, laughed and joked, and wrote super personal pieces on this blog that I would never have had the courage to publish using my non-crying dog, real-life persona.
The exercise of writing and having my words scrutinised by hundreds of people helps to cultivate independent thinking. It’s made me a better thinker, trader, and (maybe) writer. It forces me to think through both sides of each argument and double-check my numbers & inherent biases when writing about complicated topics.
Basically, what started out as a dumb challenge to write one post a week to keep me interested in the bear market has accidentally turned into one of the most valuable things I do each week. (Thanks, Cobie)
It’s also the first time for me experiencing the Crypto MMORPG in multiplayer mode rather than fighting alone as a solo player, and it’s been hugely motivating to try to contribute, help, give back, and bring others along on this journey.
The bear market truly is where you build your friendships that guide you through the bull.
Basically, 2023 was a SICK year and I am so, so, so excited to be well-positioned going into 2024 which I think will likely be even better.
Anyway, I thought it would be fun to try and write down some predictions for next year and hopefully tick them off as they come true, or pretend I never said them if they are wrong.
PREDICTION TIME AAAAAAAAAAAAAA
On Art:
Bold has his breakout year, reaching 100,000 followers and earning seven figures from art sales & sells a piece at a famous auction house.
A 10k ordinal collection will reach a floor price of > $100,000
Annoying Twitter users will once again proclaim that they don’t talk to people with PFPs less valuable than a medium-sized home.
A large non-crypto native corporation will take advantage of Solana's state compression and launch an NFT collection with millions of units.
Ordinals and Solana NFTs both do more NFT volume than Ethereum L1 across the entire year.
On points systems:
Points systems are here to stay and become increasingly accurate at predicting and encouraging user behaviour.
Hard-working and analytical people will use the early points experiments to their advantage and make lots of money.
Sybils and bot farms will be FAR less profitable as projects get better at rewarding behaviour that benefits them.
On L1s & L2s:
Monad launches and takes significant market share away from L2s reaching >20bn FDV.
Ethereum does go up in value, despite the current perception.
Blast becomes the leading L2 by all important metrics - DAUs, TVL & fun.
Blast achieves this by introducing a points system for on-chain activity. Other L2s and L1s panic and shout angrily at Pacman, but he takes their market share regardless.
Scroll and ZK Era farmers do far better than people expect.
Solana continues to grow rapidly & firmly establishes itself as the third major blockchain of importance in the minds of non-crypto natives.
Cardano still probably outperforms 95% of L1 blockchains AGAIN.
On Apps:
Oh Baby Games puts significant pressure on game stores such as Steam to begin accepting crypto games.
Blackbird becomes the first major breakout Crypto app using embedded wallets. Eat to earn is Stepn on steroids.
Friend tech / a new socialFi competitor is responsible for onboarding a million new users to Crypto.
Fifty million humans sign up for Worldcoin.
Metamask / Consensys loses huge market share as people move away from Metamask to new wallets. Linea angers half of the farming population by adding multiple seasons and farming the farmers.
On Narratives:
Post ETF Ordinals become VERY hyped as the saviour to the Block reward dilemma. Mainstream TV shows will talk about them near the top.
Ethereum re-brands as a store of value, especially post EigenDA as the narrative shifts to using Ethereum to secure other networks.
Multiple major nation states begin buying Bitcoin as a non-fiat store of value.
Public perception of Crypto starts to shift, helped by Larry Fink and co talking positively about it.
On-chain perception is still villainised and regulated further as the big players try to hold onto power and push users into centralised products. Off-ramping becomes increasingly more challenging.
STOLEN FROM BILL MONDAY BUT More communities going private/gated - shift from "public spaces" to "private spaces" to combat sybils/farming + incite fomo/premium
Misc:
Donald Trump becomes president again.
As prices go up Crypto becomes a less pleasant place to hang out. Number up but friendships down.
Twitter becomes less and less useful for information gathering, small communities of friends dedicated to researching massively outperform.
AI fear increases, and proof of personhood becomes an increasingly important topic.
As AI fear increases, the good AI does in the world increases at a far more exponential rate.
Life gets much better for most people on earth.
England win Euro 2024.
A massive thank you again to each and every one of you who has spent any amount of minutes reading my words, talking to me in Discord, or interacting with me on Twitter. I truly appreciate you all and thank you so much for making my time on the internet fun and exciting and not a miserable dungeon like my prior jobs have been.
THANK YOU, HAPPY NEW YEAR, HAVE A GREAT 2024, YOU ARE ALL GOING TO MAKE IT, EVEN BENADS.