Forget the Four-Year Cycle: Mastering Four Parallel Play Cycles in the New Era of Cryptocurrency

Forget the Four-Year Cycle: Sharing Four Parallel Gameplay Cycles in the New Era of Crypto

Author: Blockchain Researcher Haotian | CryptoInsight

Just finished chatting with several industry leaders, and everyone is discussing the same thing…

The theory of the “four-year cycle” is completely outdated!

If you are still holding on to dreams of sudden wealth, still fantasizing about “tenfold or hundredfold gains in a bull market,” you may have already been completely abandoned by the market. Why?

Because the smart money has long discovered a secret: the current Crypto ecosystem no longer applies a single strategy, but rather consists of four completely different gameplay cycles running simultaneously : Each gameplay cycle has its own rhythm, methods, and logic for making profits.

Table of Contents

• Bitcoin Super Cycle: Retail Investors Exiting, a Decade of Slow Bull Market May Become the Norm
• MEME Attention Short Wave Cycle: From Slum Paradise to Professional Scalping Ground
• Technological Narrative Leap Long Cycle: Bottom Fishing in the Valley of Death, Starting with a Tenfold in Three Years?
• Innovation Small Hotspot Short Cycle: 1-3 Month Window Period, Brewing a Major Narrative Surge

The “script” of the traditional halving cycle? Completely ineffective! BTC has evolved from a “speculative target” to an “institutional allocation asset.” The capital volume and allocation logic from Wall Street, publicly listed companies, and ETFs are completely different from the retail investors’ “bull-bear switching” strategy.

Where is the key change? Retail investors’ holdings are being massively relinquished, while institutional funds represented by MicroStrategy are entering the market in a frenzy. This fundamental restructuring of the holding structure is redefining BTC’s price discovery mechanism and volatility characteristics.

What are retail investors facing? A dual squeeze of “time cost” and “opportunity cost.” Institutions can endure a holding period of 3-5 years to wait for BTC’s long-term value realization, but retail investors? Clearly, they lack such patience and financial positioning capability.

In my view, we are likely to witness a BTC super slow bull market lasting for over ten years. The annualized return rate stabilizing in the 20-30% range, but daily volatility significantly reduced, resembling a steadily growing tech stock. As for how high BTC’s price ceiling will reach? From the perspective of current retail investors, it is even hard to predict.

The MEME long bull theory is also valid; during the technical narrative’s expression void, MEME narratives will always fill the market’s “boredom vacuum” in sync with emotions, funds, and attention.

What is the essence of MEME? It is a speculative vehicle for “instant gratification.” No white papers, no technical validation, no roadmaps, just a symbol that can bring a smile or resonate with people is enough. From cat and dog culture to political MEMEs, from AI concept packaging to community IP incubation, MEMEs have evolved into a complete “emotional monetization” industrial chain.

The deadly part is that MEME’s “short, flat, quick” characteristic has turned it into a barometer for market sentiment and a reservoir for funds. When funds are abundant, MEMEs become the preferred testing ground for hot money; when funds are scarce, MEMEs turn into the final speculative safe haven.

However, reality is brutal, the MEME market is evolving from “grassroots carnival” to “professional competition.” The difficulty for ordinary retail investors to profit in this high-frequency rotation is increasing exponentially.

The story of the P little general sitting idly to forge legends may become increasingly rare, as the entry of studios, scientists, and big players will lead to excessive competition in this once “slum paradise.”

Has the technological narrative disappeared? Not at all. Real innovations with technical barriers, such as Layer 2 scaling, ZK technology, AI infrastructure, etc., require 2-3 years or even longer build time to see actual effects. These projects follow the technology maturity curve (Gartner Hype Cycle), rather than the emotional cycle of the capital market—there is a fundamental time mismatch between the two.

The reason why the technical narrative is criticized by the market is that when projects are still in the concept stage, they are given excessively high valuations, leading to undervaluation during the “valley of death” phase when technology truly begins to land. This determines that the value release of technological projects presents a non-linear leap characteristic.

For patient investors with technical judgment, laying out truly valuable technical projects during the “valley of death” phase may be the best strategy for obtaining excess returns. But the premise is that you have to endure a long waiting period and market tribulations, as well as potential ridicule.

Before the main technical narrative takes shape, various small narratives will rotate rapidly, from RWA to DePIN, from AI Agent to AI Infra (MCP+A2A), with each small hotspot possibly having only a 1-3 month window period.

This fragmentation of narratives and high-frequency rotation reflect the current market’s scarcity of attention and the dual constraints of fund-seeking efficiency.

In fact, it is not difficult to find that typical small narrative cycles follow a six-phase model: “Concept Verification → Fund Testing → Public Opinion Amplification → FOMO Entry → Overvaluation → Fund Withdrawal.” Want to profit in this mode?

The key is to enter during the “Concept Verification” to “Fund Testing” phase and exit at the peak of “FOMO Entry.”

The competition among small narratives is essentially a zero-sum game of attention resources. However, there are technical correlations and conceptual progression relationships between narratives. For example, the MCP (Model Context Protocol) protocol and A2A (Agent-to-Agent) interaction standards in AI Infra are actually a technical bottom-up reconstruction of the AI Agent narrative. If the subsequent narratives can continue the previous hotspots, forming a systematic upgrading linkage, and genuinely precipitate a sustainable value closed loop during the linkage process, it is very likely that a super narrative of the same level as DeFi Summer will emerge.

From the existing small narrative landscape, AI infrastructure is most likely to achieve breakthroughs first. If underlying technologies such as MCP protocol, A2A communication standards, distributed computing, inference, and data networks can be organically integrated, there is indeed the potential to construct a super narrative similar to “AI Summer.”

In summary, recognizing the essence of these four parallel gameplay cycles is crucial to finding suitable strategies within their respective rhythms. Undoubtedly, the single “four-year cycle” mindset has completely failed to keep pace with the current complexity of the market.

Adapting to the new normal of “multiple gameplay cycles running in parallel” may be the key to truly profiting in this bull market.

This article is reprinted with permission from “Forget the Four-Year Cycle: Sharing Four Parallel Gameplay Cycles in the New Era of Crypto.”