132. Look Out for these Crypto Trends in 2024

Looking at our bold predictions for 2024 now, Deepin is a decentralized physical infrastructure network. It's basically a name for a blockchain network that uses tokens to incentivize communities, not corporations to build physical infrastructure networks. A new era for Web3 games arrived. There's going to be a lot of AI overlap with a lot of the blockchain programs with these on chain agents. Welcome back to another episode of the Bennett Box podcast. I'm Ben, your favorite high school dropout and founder of collective shift alongside Ms. Burgs, your favorite MBA and CEO of Collective Shift. Join us as we bring you world class crypto research and strategies to help you dominate this crypto bull market as well as behind the scenes view of us scanning a fully remote subscription research business. And today we are looking at the 2024 crypto outlook and predictions. What do the team and bergs and I think is going to happen in 2024? We've analyzed and synthesized a lot of information from a lot of the big funds that have been out and given their predictions and we've sort of put together what we think are the most common themes are going to happen in 2024 and how you can take advantage of that. Where is bitcoin going? Where are the sectors they're going to run and where you should be placing your money? So really if I kick off the the most common themes that we think are going to play out in 2024 stems around a few different areas. One is that we do think bitcoin hits a new record high in 2024. As we head into the post Haring era, those 12 to 18 months post Bitcoin halving is the most bullish and historically the best for price. So obviously the bitcoin har is coming up in April. We fully expect price to really run for the year. Following that, a new era for Web3Games arrives. So as we know there's been so much money pumped into the market over the last, you know, sort of couple of years in the gaming sector. We've got a lot of new games coming out this year which is going to be really exciting. There's going to be a lot of AI overlap with a lot of the blockchain different.

Sort of programs with these on chain agents really making things more scalable and more programmable for markets and computing resources. And then obviously stablecoins continuing to be increasing commerce. Stablecoins are just, you know, continuing to grow in, in terms of volumes and on chain activity, you know, I've Got the Stables app on my phone, which I'm able to pay for things with stable coins, which is really cool and just a great use case for, for cryptocurrencies. And then also Solana's D pin narrative source. This has been in the headlines, you know, pretty recently. It's a new sort of sector. Solana's obviously been in the spotlight for the last like six to 12 months and the, the deep in narratives starting to grow as well, which we'll touch on as well. But they're sort of the main, you know, themes that we think they're going to come up in 2024 burgs. Is there any other themes that you're thinking that will sort of show up this year?

I think Ethereum all time high with everything that's happening, ETF on the horizon, I really see that happening this year and I think all of these, they're pretty solid because you've got, you know, Bitcoin, you've had an etf, you've got the halving happening, Solana's gone nuts and you've got the decentralized physical infrastructure, networks, web, three huge things had money pumped into it during the bear market they've been building. You've got AI and blockchain. AI is huge. It's come off the boiler a bit. But combine it with blockchain, different ages doing different things, people experimenting and of course stablecoins. Where are you going to put your profits? It's very rare that you're going to convert it back into fiat and a lot of people use Dexs nowadays, so they want a stable coin. It's much easier just to hold it in that crypto environment, unless you need to take it out and actually spend it. And even if you do, like you said, you can use the Stables app.

Yeah, man, I think you've nailed it there with, with Ethereum. It really underperformed last year and the sentiment really went bearish when Solana started to run. But I think there's gonna be a bit of a rotation back to Ethereum. There's some major catalysts happening this year for Ethereum. First of all is the, the Den upgrade that's coming in March or April. They're going to make Layer Twos super, super fast. They were looking at like 10 times cheaper transactions. So I think Ethereum and layer twos are going to have a bit of attention, you know, this year again, Layer two sort of under underperformed again last year we've got the restaking driven by the Eigen Layer Token launch. So that should be coming out mid this year. If you've been following the podcast and a member of ours, you have got on the Eigen layer airdrop staking which is coming up, which is super exciting. Also the Ethereum etf, there's been talks that the ETF may be approved at some point this year. So front running that ETF, as we saw, same with the Bitcoin ETF could fuel a movement for the Ethereum price to continue upwards. And then also that sort of stable coin fuel just continue to build that narrative around.

Leveraging Eth yield and things like that on native stable coins. So that's super exciting. I think Ethereum is going to be a big one. But Berg, I mean Solana, if we just touch on Solana for a second, that has just been in the limelight for a little while now. Let's talk about the Deepin narrative. So we'll talk about what that is. First of all though, like Solana I think is up 900% in the last year or so. Like it's had a huge growth after the FTX events. And you know, it had a lot of the blockchain, we had a lot of time off, it was just really struggling. But the.

I like that the blockchain had a lot of time off where they hit the pause button, mate, hit the pause button and that's it. So one of our content creators, Leon, he's covered this extensively, Metaverse explorer and he's been across this for years. We give him a lot of stick about it because Solana kept pausing their blockchain and it's like any company, like when you're or product, when you're small and you start out, you're going to have failures. You need a lot of control. These types of things are going to happen. And then there was the Solana narrative with all the VCs dumping on everyone, Solana getting crushed into oblivion. But the community was still quite large and people were building and they've even delivered some quite decent games. And then these people that are active are now being rewarded with significant airdrops, which drives activities and claims back to the soul token. And the price is just gone through the roof. People are cracking the shits with ETH because it costs so much for gas fees to move stuff around where on Solana it's like a cent and it's close to instant. So people are wanting to have that crypto experience and not get absolutely slaughtered and lose their money and pay a lot. On Ethereum, the things that we're all used to. And that's why the narrative has really shifted to Solana.

Yeah, 100% Bergson. And that upgrade that went through recently, the Fire Dancer upgrade obviously really has been a significant catalyst and strengthening to strengthen the Salana network. And then they've also got another upgrade coming mid this year which is the Franken Dancer, which may arrive in the first half of the year, which is really just, you know, growing the Salana ecosystem and made things a lot better. But this Deepin narrative has been sort of the top of people's. It was top of sort of conversation at the moment. Now Deepin is a decentralized physical infrastructure network as it's basically a name for a blockchain network that uses tokens to incentivize communities, not corporations to build physical infrastructure networks. I think mobility, electric vehicle charging, telecoms from the ground up, etc. So in the world of large scale infrastructure, we're witnessing a shift from the usual top down approach with the emergence of Deepin. Unlike the traditional model, led by a central authority, Deep in champions decentralization, spreading decision making across the network for increased capability. So one of the projects that we actually spoke about in our member community not that long ago was Hive Mapper. So this was one of Matt's underrated altcoins for the year. And what Hive Mapper does is it offers a token to drivers who install a dash cam, like physical drivers driving a car to collect mapping data as they drive around. And this basically renders. So the render allows anyone with excess GPU power to connect their hardware to its protocol to earn by providing computing power for customer use cases such as machine learning. So very similar to the wireless network Helium, which is a 5G mobile network. You basically just get paid to utilize this hardware to build out the software using your data, which is kind of cool. Bugs.

I've seen this before like. So back in the day we used to have SETI and protein folding. So SETI was like SETI at home. It was some, you know, satellite thing. And they'll get massive images from space and they'll need people's extra CPU compute in order to solve these problems to then render those images. And protein folding was a similar thing. So they're working at different proteins in the body need massive compute. This is before cloud and everything like that and people would just rent out their CPUs. You do it for free because it's a volunteer type thing. But then I had this narrative again, Ben, where it's do you remember iota? This was exactly the same thing where you'd have the Internet of Things, you'd have iota tokens, you get paid to rent out time and use that extra compute to validate transactions. And now we've got it again. And.

I like the narrative but first of all doing anything with decentralized compute absolutely sucks. No one will even people that work it will never recommend it. Then there's bandwidth restrictions, what you can do, what you actually get overheating your device, lots of other things as well. I like it as a concept but it'll be interesting to see how it actually goes in practice and at scale.

Yeah, it's interesting. We, we'll definitely find out. And the prices run up. I mean the, the you know, hive mapper itself is only 120 mil market cap. But like you said Bergs like these things are you know, great ideas and great on paper but then the execution is just like extremely difficult to pull off.

Just look at the narrative. Ben, it's Deepin. Are you not in Deepin? No, you're not across Deepin mate. You gotta be across it. You gotta get in there. It's the latest thing, it's amazing. I got 15 deep in tokens. It got through the roof, mate.

What is deep in now? I couldn't tell you, mate.

Yeah, exactly. And I bet you the majority of people even if you see that physical infrastructure network would not know what that means. And the actual IT tech that has to like plug together to be able to run on those devices and do certain things and it's a nightmare. But it is a really good narrative and some things do work like mesh networks work. Things like what are those little tags, those apps? Apple Air tags, that's an example of that. We create a mesh network with the phones and if there's a tag nearby it'll let you know. That kind of stuff really works. So if these guys on the projects in DPING can crack it and use something like this and people get rewarded, that's amazing.

Yeah, we'll see how it plays out.

Yeah.

Now in terms of stepping it back a little bit, looking at the macro thesis for 2024, this is a, a piece by Victor who posted this for our members very recently just around the macro thesis for 2024. So basically what he's talking about here is the rate hiking cycle has ended and the consensus outlook for rates is starting to trend lower this year, which is a positive. If the economy performs so well that it overheats, he doubts that many rate cuts will occur. And as Such rates will only decline if the economy permits it now. Moreover, the extended period of transitory inflation will lead to a deterioration of U.S. household savings. This will lead to a slowdown in consumer spending, pressuring corporate profit margins and in turn the labor market will slow leading to weakness in wage growth. Now finally the US the Fed will have the comfort to drop rates. He's in the camp that the Fed will not reduce rates as quickly as the market expects, but rates will fall further from the Feds for the Fed's current forecast. And then obviously we've got the US Elections will also play a pivotal role.

And a few things happening over in China and the debt recycling market. So great little report there from him. Overall, I think it's going to be relatively positive for risk on assets. This is my opinion, risk on assets if the rates continue to come down and you know, potentially start to see bitcoin really push post bitcoin halving. And yeah, Matt also sort of agrees with this, thinking that we'll probably hit all time highs for bitcoin. Nick not so much our other analyst, he thinks he'll get close, but Matt's in the camp of, of all time highs.

That's awesome. And if you think just in your day to day, like things are getting more expensive. We hear about housing crises every single day. This is just within Australia. It's probably even worse in the States. They've got an election coming up and generally leading into election, they'll make promises, they'll do rate cuts, they'll do whatever to get in. And we generally tend to follow the States, especially in money markets. But I think, you know, you can't raise interest rates forever. You can, especially at the point there are now like we're almost at breaking point for a lot of people, particularly in Australia. We're doing some tax cuts, they're not significant. Prices are still going up. So something needs to be done. Inflation, Inflation does need to be curbed, but not so much that, you know, you get a riot on your hands. I think it takes a lot for Australians to riot. The French, not so much. But yeah, things, things are getting expensive. They're very challenging. Interest rates are high and once that comes off the boil, capital becomes cheaper, people start to invest more, they have more money and access to capital and they'll start to flow into risk on assets.

Yeah, man, I, I sat down, did my personal finances the other day and it's, it's fascinating. You sit down and go, wow, like, like unless you're investing, you know, you're not going to be able to get ahead in life unless you're like, you know, 15017, 200K plus sort of salary and maybe you have a family and you're a spouse and you can sort of, you know, bring your incomes together. But you know, it, it's very expensive to live in Australia. Well, in the cities especially, like the cost of living has gone up so much and then. And even I spoke to a friend of mine who's, who lives in America recently. She was telling me that like teachers in the US have a second job during the holidays to be able to afford to, to live. They're not on high, big wages at all. And during summer holidays they're on, they're on the second job to pay for things like. That's wild.

Yeah, they don't get the benefits that teachers over here get. I think teachers over here are still underpaid, but in the States especially and you know, it's a core job that they need in the state. It's very. Yeah, things are very challenging over there. I saw a tweet where it's like, if you take out the top four big tech companies from the states, like what do you have left? And it's like, whoa. Because they generate like a lot of income, a lot of taxes, a lot of jobs.

Yeah. Challenging times.

Anyway, so looking at our bold predictions for 2024 from our analyst, Nick expects the stablecoin market to hit record highs. AN S&P 500 company adopts Bitcoin and the Lightning network integrated by an E commerce giant. I like that. And a Web three native game wins over our Web two gamers and.

All right, hang on, hang on. Before we go on, let's speculate here, mate. So stablecoin market cap. Yeah, I think that's a given where if everything else is going up, you'll need to rotate into stables to take profits. Now who do we think this S&P 500 company that will adopt the bitcoin lightning network integrated by an E commerce giant. What do we think in Amazon? Apple Payout? Twitter?

It could be Twitter.

It could be Twitter. Maybe it could be Shopify. I mean probably Shopify already has some sort of integration, but yeah, I'm thinking Twitter may, maybe Amazon. I mean that's a stretch I think this year. But you know, if Shopify goes and then, you know, Amazon come on board.

Or mine's, mine's actually they do move a bit slower, but I think Apple, because for years they've been talking about building in different types of Wallets, particularly bitcoin ones, into their phones and into their Apple hardware. And if, if we're really talking about this, they do similar shit anyway with the way their hardware is and the way it's set up and the, the security protocols that they have. So it won't be anything kind of new, it's just done in a different way and native to a device. So they definitely have the capability there. And could you imagine if you just had a phone and it was a common phone like an iPhone, and it just came with a bitcoin wallet in it, it was a hardware wallet already.

That would be cool.

How crazy is that?

That would be very cool. The reason, the reason I think Twitter. Well, the reason I don't think Apple is just because of how restricted they are on anything. Like even think about it like our 30%, you know, Apple Store, app Store.

Sort of revenue thing. What? Well, I don't think they're necessarily restrictive. I think they are for other people because they want to own and control everything. So if they own it and there's an opportunity, I think they'll go for it. And I think especially among younger people where I've heard this so much, where.

Housing'S so expensive, wages are quite low for younger people, that they're starting to invest in crypto because it's one way to leapfrog a generation because the risk is there but the reward is also there. Whereas if you just invest in like shares, it's unlikely that you're going to get the multiples that you're seeking to accelerate your wealth. So that, that's. And Twitter's already said as well that they are going to start integrating crypto payments. So it'll be interesting to see which one they actually choose and how they do that.

So Twitter or X just announced or just launched in the last sort of week or 2x payments.

Ah yeah, I saw that. Yeah, yeah, the account.

Yeah, so funny. We'll see. There's no, there's no text, there's no anything.

So we'll see what happens.

Amazing. And a Web3 native game wins over Web2 gamers. That would be amazing to see because Web2 is an insane. Sorry, just gaming is an insane market. Like I even like play Apex Legends and just to see people go to and from that game every couple of months when there's a new release and it's just so hyper competitive Red Ocean. So they'll need to compete with those guys. To be honest, they don't even need to mention It's a web 3 game. It just needs to be a good game. I want to see Web3 devs make an amazing Web2 game. And let's be honest, they're building on similar tooling. They're just adding Web3 componentry. So it's more about kind of the business model behind it and it needs to be seamless to the people, so it needs to offer them something that Web2Gaming doesn't have. So an amazing game, a different game or different game mechanics to really bring them over.

But you're right, like who cares About Blockchain and Web3 and NFT just make a good game.

Yeah, that's exactly it.

Awesome, man. And Matt's was Solana breaks all time highs of $260.

The real world asset sector fails to meet expectations and underperforms the market. Interesting. And transaction fees on Ethereum Layer twos are still widely considered too high in the months after the Den car upgrade, keeping the window of opportunity open for other low cost blockchains to attract users and developers. That's interesting because, you know, I'm pretty heavily invested in the RWA sector. So we'll see how that plays out. I definitely think that it's got a lot of narrative there at the moment. So we'll see if that sort of.

Continues to bring retail interest and then yeah, the transaction fees on Ethereum Layer twos, I mean, I think that's why we're seeing so many people piling to alternative blockchains, Avalanche, Solana, you know, et cetera, et cetera, because of how expensive Ethereum is. So yeah, see how that plays out.

I agree with the first two. So Solana will break an all time high. I definitely think so. Real world assets. Yeah, I think that's.

It's a boring thing and I think if you're in crypto.

I don't know if they're really going to go towards this or if it's going to get traction. I know a lot of people that have been trying this for years in real estate and gold and a few other things and it hasn't really taken off. I don't see how that will actually take off now. Even things like flat coins, I don't think they will really take off. And transaction fees ON Ethereum layer 2 considered too high. That's interesting because from my perspective, they're really, really cheap. You know, they're more than Solana but they're cents. Right. And they're almost instant. And Matt could be talking about Ethereum L2s and they're settling on L1, that could still be expensive, having to go between the two. But that's interesting, like attracting low cost blockchains, attracting users and developers. Because the chicken and egg problem, right, like if you've got all the developers, they'll make the stuff and if they make good stuff, people will come. If the people are over there, then that's where I want to go. Because everyone's there and they're already using that technology.

Yeah, I think that's why we're seeing so many competitive. Well, I mean that's why Solana's run so good. And I think that sort of, you know, confirms Matt's thesis here, is that Solana will continue to run based off the fact that Ethereum is still expensive to operate. So yeah, we'll see.

It's interesting where maybe Solana is like there could be a two speed kind of thing here where Solana is a thing. You just barrel in, you do what you want. It's amazing. You have fun, you play games, you get NFTs. If you got something serious like an expensive NFT or you want to send a decent amount of money or whatever it may be, you start doing those on L1s, like Ethereum. Yeah.

And that's where the security comes in.

Right.

Like why Ethereum so good and why is it expensive? Because it's, it's not going to disappear. It's very, it's very secure, it is slower, it's more expensive. But you know, you've got the backing of the whole Ethereum community, not just a new blockchain, so.

Absolutely cool, man.

So interesting to wrap things up. You know, our forecast is really for, and this is back to the macro a little bit, but the forecast is for looser monetary and fiscal policies around the world in 2024, driving the price of hard assets higher. Bitcoin. As asset owners experience a greater sense of wealth, they will consume more and speculate more, leading to a repeat of euphoria. Well, we don't know when this will occur. We are confident we will return and it's simply a matter of time. And I think that's really lined up with the post halving events. We bring in lower rates, we start to print more money, assets go higher, people speculate and we bring on a bull market. Hopefully that plays out later this year.

Amazing, mate. Bring it on, Bring it on.

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Thanks. Championship.