What You Missed from The World's BIGGEST Crypto Conference

I've attended so many crypto events over the last eight years, but this one probably tops the lot. Coming back from Singapore at token 2049, this was the biggest crypto conference I've ever attended. Over 20,000 people. I had so many meetings, went to so many events and listened to so many amazing speakers. And in this video, I'm going to share with you my key takeaways for you as an investor to get an inside word on what's going on with the crypto market. Where are the narratives? Where should you be parking your attention? And, and maybe what are the narratives that have been and gone in crypto? And the biggest thing that I took away is that we are still waiting for the ChatGPT moment for crypto. AI has been around for 10, 12, 13 years, but it wasn't until ChatGPT came to all of us that we started to realize, oh, this is what actually AI is. What is that product in crypto? So far we've got bitcoin, everyone understands bitcoin. But for the rest of 15,000 cryptocurrencies, there's very few actual solutions that have hit the mainstream media. Right now, probably the biggest product that has gotten outside of this little bubble that we live in is polymarket. Polymarket is the betting app where you can bet on different outcomes of different markets. And the US election has obviously been the biggest one. But what is the really big products that's going to bring in the next billion users into crypto? Back in 2017 we had the ICOs. In 2021 we had the NFTs and the Metaverse and gaming. Currently we do not have that mainstream narrative and that adoption that's going to bring people into crypto. At the moment, the two main narratives that I'm looking at are probably anything around AI or deep in, and obviously there's a lot of exciting stuff on next gen layer ones which I'll talk about as well. But what is that product going to be that's going to allow those next people to come into crypto now? In August and September, at the time of recording, this has been two of the quietest months, you know, in record across the all 12 months. Right. It's been a very quiet period. I think all of the market is waiting for the last quarter now. I also thought that, you know, looking at the calendar returns was sometimes just a bit of a, you know, a false narrative. But actually speaking to the projects on the ground in Singapore, a lot of these projects actually wait for the last three months of the year. To actually release their announcements because they know August and September are quiet months. So there's so many amazing announcements coming out in the next three months for crypto and I think this is going to really drive the market forward. But again, I don't think we're going to see a raging bull market until we really see something that consumers to grapple onto. Now, Asia itself is, I think, an undertapped market in all of crypto. Right. Living here in Australia, we probably forget how much user adoption is going on in, in the likes of Vietnam, Singapore, Thailand, even Indonesia. There's so much crypto adoption going over there. But as I was going through the conference and looking around all the exhibitors and looking at the projects, I've been in this space for eight years and honestly I barely recognized any of the projects that were exhibiting throughout the conference. There is so much market saturation in the projects. There was literally this whole floor, it took you about 10 minutes to walk from one end to the other and, and two floors of this full of exhibitors. Now these exhibitors pay tens of thousands of dollars to be there. And I walked through and, you know, spoke to a lot of them and seen what was around. Honestly, as I mentioned, there was not many. I really recognize there's so much over saturation in crypto, especially in the layer one space, credit card space, stablecoin space exchanges. Everyone is vying for market positioning. But the reality is in crypto, in my opinion, there's probably only maximum 10 real world problems that crypto can actually solve and there's over 15,000 projects vying for those positions. So as an investor, my key takeaway here was that again, there's so much market saturation with very little, you know, market capital coming in. With your investing thesis and your strategy, you must keep it simple. I think if you over complicate things and try and chase coins this cycle again, it's not going to be like previous cycles where you just bet on anything and everything goes up. I really do believe this cycle only the key projects will survive and get that market attention. Everyone is vying for very few eyeballs right now in crypto and with the, you know, how little retail interest there are when you've got so many projects vying for attention, this can really put pressure on these projects to try and, you know, do crazy things for their marketing and try and get exposure. If you've got, you know, older projects that have been around for a long time for the likes of Polkadot, Cardano, xrp, in my opinion, a lot of these chains don't have a chance against these, these next gen futuristic, you know, projects that have the community, that have the momentum, that had the sentiment that are coming into the market, especially as there's the volume of these projects coming in and we saw that on the ground now. What are these projects that are going to be getting the attention in future months? Well, the biggest key narratives and things that people were talking about at the conference certainly was AI. AI was a huge, huge topic at the conference. I think the likes of rendering bittensor spectral. These are all projects prime, which I'm personally invested in. These are all projects that I think are going to get, you know, really big narratives as consumers come back in. But also you can start to figure out, you know, hey, how AI actually plays in, you know, at a grand level. Whether it be through you know, mining crypto and having AI, you know, creating better algorithms to mine the crypto, or whether it be AI interfaces where you can interact with a chat, GPT or crypto and it can do the trading for you. There's so many different AI integrations and you know, not only from the project level and internally helping, you know, projects create and code faster, but also, you know, integrating the project. I think AI is continually going to be a big area, especially in the decentralized AI space. Like that ability that we've all, you know, been thinking about, especially with ChatGPT is how a lot of the creation of the AI is still quite centralized. Like who is controlling that, how is the narrative created? We with decentralized AI, we all have a part to play in how those AI bots are created and how they're trained, which I think is really important. The next big one was those next gen layer ones, the likes of Sui Aptos, Beretchain. These new next gen layer ones are quote unquote trying to be the Solana killers, right? They're trying to be faster, quicker, different style of blockchains that computing faster and doing different things. These are the next gen layer ones that I think is getting the community quite excited right now. I'm personally not investing in them too heavily. I'm still very bullish on Ethereum and Solana. I think a lot of these projects will have their time in the sun and yes, they're probably going to get good price increase, they're going to get a lot of attention. But again there's so much saturation in the layer one space that I just think that again from a investment portfolio perspective, we must be really cautious about over investing in These layer ones because you can end up with just a bunch of altcoins in your portfolio. And when the market really pulls back or when we get, right now when there's not a lot of retail attention, these projects are going to really find it hard to get get that mind space outside of AI and next gen layer ones. There was a lot of talk about dpin, a lot of talk about stable coins, but what there wasn't a lot of talk about was there was very little gaming and very little Metaverse. You know, these were two very big themes in previous cycles. I've personally been very heavy investor in the metaverse. There was basically zero metaverse that I saw. There was a little bit of gaming. I'm personally invested in a couple of gaming projects, Ronin for one, like the Ronin Blockchain and also a Prime, which is sort of that gaming AI, you know, integration. But I think really what the VCs were pushing that still where the biggest valuations are coming from is that infrastructure level. There are very few good consumer applications that have actually been building crypto right now. As I said at the start, like Polymarket is probably the only consumer application that's been created that has made it outside of our little bubble of crypto. Really where a lot of the VCs continue to invest is that infrastructure level. Like your Ethereum, Solana, you know, the other layer ones, you know, Barachain Sui, these newer projects, this is where a lot of the capital is going in because there's a clear, you know, clear point where these projects can get into the billions of dollars of valuations. There's very few consumer applications in crypto that can actually get to that level. And one of the things that's holding that back is, you know, from my key takeaways was one the lack of understanding from retail investors, like the lack of knowledge from retail investors is, you know, actually holding valuations back. And also too, which was a point where One of the VCs made was there's actually very few good quality founders in crypto that can actually build high quality consumer applications. We've got to remember when we're investing into crypto that these are, these are startups. At the end of the day, these are projects that are building in crypto. They've got founders, they're trying to find product market fit, they've got runways, they're trying to build something that we want to use. And once you add tokenization, decentralization and blockchain and crypto, just the level of, you know, difficulty continues to Rise and multiply. So we need to understand that, you know, at the end of the day we're investing in early stage startups. These are hugely, highly risky, you know, assets and in a market where you don't have that momentum and don't have that, you know, new capital coming in, it can be very, very difficult for these projects to find, you know, mind share, you know, amongst the, amongst the industry. Another thing when investing in altcoins, which I really got, you know, glimpse of when speaking to all of the projects, you know, in person, is that one of the biggest things of, you know, for VCs is obviously getting in early in these projects. So a lot of these VCs get really undervalued prices to these assets and then they have these token unlocks where they can go and sell their assets, you know, on chain now in September alone there's over $2.1 billion of token unlocks in the altcoin space, which is wild. Even in the next two weeks of time of recording there's over $600 million of token unlocks including likes of Sui and Solana, taking up a massive amount of VC capital that are basically being able to come on chain and unlock into retail investors. Now when you have such huge unlocks of supply, it really puts, you know, pressure, I guess on the, on the sell side and when you don't have those demand from the consumers and retail investors, it puts huge sell pressure on the price and that's why sometimes it can be difficult for these prices to really grow, you know, into these coming months. So another thing we really got to understand with these old coins that the tokenomics is hugely important and there's a lot of really poor token economics from a retail side, you know, you and I investing, they're great for VCs and they're great for the projects themselves. But ultimately a lot of them are creating huge sell pressure in the market. So we've got to understand token unlocks. And now the last thing is just, you know, probably just being at the conference. It made me super excited and super confident about the space. You know, hearing Vitalik speak, going to the events, going to the conferences, you know, really hearing, you know, the projects that have been building that there hasn't been a lot of excitement over the last few months. Like I completely understand that but there's so much exciting stuff to happen and we know how quickly crypto turns. Like it doesn't take much for the market to turn around a rip and all of a sudden everyone's excited again. Now, I know the ETH BC BTC chart has been, you know, on a downwards trend for the last probably two or three years now. And it's probably put a lot of pressure on these, these projects to try and deliver. But I think that will return. You know, I think crypto will come back. I think we'll get some sort of consumer application the next year or two that gets everyone excited again, that brings investors back. I think that's what's going to drive the next real big wave of mass adoption. But ultimately, I'm still super confident crypto, the four year cycle stands. I've done a lot of other content around that if you want to check that out. But you know, overall, the token24.9 experience was epic. I had a lot of amazing conversations with the businesses, with the projects and there's a lot of great, exciting things to come. But yeah, focus on those narratives, simplify your profile and your portfolio and you're going to have a really successful time in crypto. So hopefully you enjoyed that. If you've got any other questions about the conference, please drop them in the comments below. Otherwise, I'll see you in the next video.