Author: ignas

Translation: Shan Oppa, Golden Finance

Time has come to 2032:

You wake up at the Four Seasons Hotel, feeling a bit tired. The two Negronis from last night are still haunting your mind. A notification pops up on your phone: you check your Rabby wallet on your iPhone 23 XXL. Bitcoin has dropped 3% overnight. It's another panic triggered by the Saylor strategy.

However, even so, the price of Bitcoin is still as high as $1.2 million. You smile— that crazy Udi was right after all! You have long "retired" your family's financial burden— although you entered the market at $114,000, you used 3x leverage and successfully got on board with Hyperliquid. Although Cobie's prediction was slightly off: the real challenge was the phase from $80,000 to $250,000, while the journey from $250,000 to $1 million was the "easy road."

The bull market from 2024 to 2029 was indeed unusual— that year marked the end of the four-year cycle, and miraculously, your 3x leveraged trade was not liquidated. Thanks to Trump's third term, the U.S. successfully held 5% of the world's Bitcoin reserves.

A hint of regret surfaces in your mind: if you hadn't exchanged some ETH for private equity in OpenAI and SpaceX, your assets would be even greater now. Unfortunately, neither of these companies went public; instead, they directly tokenized on the Ethereum Layer 2 network of NASDAQ.

Nevertheless, those tokenized equities still played a significant role as collateral on Aave and Fluid.

Your mind begins to sketch out bigger dreams:

The Monad mainnet is about to launch, and the airdrop for the testnet is also coming soon. Once it arrives, you will purchase a second property in Antigua and Barbuda and conveniently apply for a passport. By the time the EU implements a 50% "crypto solidarity tax" next year, you will be free to act.

However, your friends are not so lucky.

They believed the advice from the Financial Times and BBC experts, investing their funds in EU defense bonds with an annualized return of 4%, holding EUR-CBDC, just to save for a down payment on a one-bedroom apartment. Now, with inflation at 8%, even receiving a basic income of €2,500 per month makes that goal increasingly unattainable.

You feel sad, but you have a clear conscience: you had advised them to invest in cryptocurrencies, but they didn't listen.

Gathering your thoughts, you start getting dressed and brushing your teeth. You open the X app— suddenly a prompt pops up: "Please verify your age using a government-issued ID to log in."

Oh no, the VPN is down again. You quickly switch your IP to Afghanistan, reopen X, and finally manage to log in. Visiting friends in the UK always feels particularly different. It's time to "work" a bit and then catch a flight home.

Selling Dreams of Cryptocurrency

The most powerful selling point of the crypto world is its ability to inspire people to dream of a better, more prosperous life.

The power of this message is especially pronounced in the current geopolitical and economic environment— people are struggling with bills, unable to find jobs, and their privacy is constantly eroding (for example, the UK's "Cybersecurity Bill"). You open the news, scroll through TikTok, browse Instagram, and the information flow is filled with feelings of helplessness and despair.

But the atmosphere on Crypto Twitter is completely different. Cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin are seen as keys to solving financial difficulties. This is also why I specifically mentioned the plight of your friends who didn't buy cryptocurrencies in the opening story of 2032.

Coinbase understands this, and they execute their messaging very well.

Their "Everything is Fine" ad made me laugh out loud with its satire of the UK's current situation, but they weren't wrong.

The reason I love cryptocurrencies is that it is a place where people dare to dream. But it is also precisely because of this that crypto skeptics dislike us.

They don't believe our stories, thinking these dreams are unrealistic and too far-fetched. Can blockchain change society? In their eyes, it's just a "fancy spreadsheet."

But as Nat Friedman said: "Pessimism sounds smart, optimism makes money."

The reason cryptocurrencies can inspire grand dreams is that they have no barriers and no permissions. This is also why scammers are keen on this industry— they sell fantasies under the banner of "a more prosperous life," only to destroy reality.

But I am not a scammer. Neither are you.

We genuinely believe that cryptocurrencies can have a positive impact on people's lives and society as a whole:

1) It strengthens the protection of personal property,

2) It guarantees freedom and privacy in finance and the internet.

Although the crypto industry has achieved tremendous success in just a few years, I feel that many people in the crypto circle are forgetting how to have grand dreams.

We have all forgotten how to dream

Once, our grand dreams attracted countless retail investors into this industry. But now, why would new retail investors still be willing to buy ETH? If even the most seasoned crypto users are still using the target price from the last bull market— $10,000?

The progress of ETH in recent years has been immense: spot ETFs approved, traditional finance acceptance, stablecoin ecosystem growth, regulatory advancements, tokenization of real-world assets (RWA), Robinhood launching L2 networks…

Did all this only result in a 2-3x increase?

Perhaps we are too eager for "mainstream recognition." So when traditional finance joined in, the stories of "Lamborghini" and "skyrocketing" faded from the crypto narrative.

Now, only those "shitcoins" (like XRP, ADA, etc.) and Bitcoin can still ignite people's dreams. At least BTC is still drawing a blueprint for a "path to a million dollars."

Meanwhile, ETH and most altcoins are no longer telling big dreams. But ETH still has hope to regain its dreams.

For years, the Ethereum community has been pushing the narrative of "supersonic currency." But with the successful expansion of the network and the reduction of gas fees, this deflationary narrative has also collapsed. The technical team and marketing team ultimately failed to advance in sync. Now, the narrative has returned to the fundamentals: institutional adoption, stablecoins, real-world assets (RWA).

Although these are not new concepts, this time the stories are being told by louder and more credible voices, such as Thomas Lee and Joseph Lubin.

Who tells the story is as important as the story itself. More and more publicly listed companies are incorporating ETH into their balance sheets, which has also become a driving factor. This gives more confidence to those still on the sidelines. Even the bears are starting to admit that this strategy is working.

But if all these efforts are ultimately just to get ETH to the target price of $10,000?

Then ETH needs a more sexy, more imaginative story— a reason that makes people willing to hold ETH long-term.

BTC is digital gold. So what is ETH? Digital oil? I believe that new story will eventually emerge. I remain bullish on ETH.

Now let's look at Solana.

In 2024, Solana brought a "grassroots comeback" story through memecoins, once shining brightly. But as most meme investors lost money, the appeal of Solana and $SOL also declined. $SOL is neither a traditional financial chain like ETH nor does it have the store of value property like BTC. When people keep losing money on memecoins, that story no longer excites.

How to reignite people's dreams?

• "When I buy a token, I want to have grand dreams."

• However, nowadays, most projects focus only on promoting technical features rather than depicting their grand vision.

• "The true meaning of a token is to bring dreams to the community." — DefiIgnas (posted on X)

Looking back, it's astonishing that a single oracle protocol, ChainLink's $LINK, can also allow all of us to have grand dreams.

I once told myself: "LINK is the most egalitarian thing we've ever seen. Its ambition is immense, and if successful, it could reshape the entire social structure."

Or take a look at Compound's COMP. What’s exciting about a lending protocol? A DEX aggregator? A cross-chain infrastructure? So what?

These tokens were once thrilling because they were not isolated; they belonged to a larger movement—Decentralized Finance (DeFi). "Be your own bank," and if you don't like the direction of the team, you can vote in the DAO with the governance tokens in your hand— you can influence the future!

At that time, it truly felt revolutionary.

But now, people no longer believe in DAOs. DeFi tokens have devolved into investment assets, focusing solely on revenue and transaction fee returns, completely losing the allure of their narrative.

Back when LINK, COMP, UNI, YFI, and other projects were launched, they were the pioneers of the entire market, the trailblazers of DeFi. They represented an unprecedented innovation.

But now, when a new DEX, a new lending protocol, a new oracle, or an infrastructure project emerges— it’s hard to ignite people's imagination. Is this the price we pay for crypto gradually "maturing" as an asset class? Nowadays, most new projects or TGE announcements on the X platform evoke almost no excitement. Because these projects are either marginal upgrades to existing giants or merely founders and VCs trying to quickly monetize their personal "big dreams" rather than serve the community.

My advice to project founders is: invest time and money to create a coherent story and convey grand dreams through storytelling. Marketing is not just about posting paid technical posts, pretty UI interfaces, and some memes through social media managers on X.

It is indeed hard work, but it will make you stand out.

Investors seek support for grand dreams. However, those who sell grand dreams often lack the backing of technological innovation or are outright scammers.

That said, here are some projects that excel at selling big dreams (but not necessarily the best projects).

Projects and Tokens Good at "Selling Big Dreams"

SPX6900

To be honest, I’m still not sure what this token is really about. It seems like just a meme, right? But Murad is a master storyteller, and this token has risen by about 15,000%.

His pinned post on X is titled: "150 Reasons SPX6900 Will Reach a Market Cap of $1 Trillion."

You should know, that’s twice the current market cap of Ethereum! Absurd? Ridiculous? Maybe, but who cares? The key is that he makes the community dare to dream.

Murad's narrative also starts from that old comparison: If you don’t invest in crypto, AI will take your job, and you are doomed to fail. You might think this sounds like a pyramid scheme, but he is indeed holding onto these coins, unlike those projects that dump after the launch. Many crypto founders should learn from him.

(Disclaimer: I do not hold SPX6900 myself.)

Pudgy Penguins

Pudgy Penguins is my favorite crypto brand, bar none.

It’s hard not to like it: cute, rising prices (I bought the NFT for $2,000), and its mission is to spread positivity in the metaverse. The total views on social media have reached billions, and Pudgy Penguins is currently the most likely project to become the external image representative of the crypto industry. More importantly, $PENGU is the only top memecoin native to Web3, unlike DOGE, PEPE, or SHIBA, which borrowed from Web2 culture. So, Pudgy Penguins is actually the PR representative of our entire industry, helping to repair the public's negative perception of crypto.

Worldcoin

You may dislike their uncomfortable AI iris-scanning orb or their highly centralized token model, but one thing you cannot deny: their ambition.

Worldcoin's mission is to build a global identity and financial network, distinguishing humans from AI and promoting global economic participation. Isn’t that one of the original core missions of crypto?

Farcaster

Farcaster's X bio might be the most "unambitious" sentence you can find in the entire crypto industry: "A sufficiently decentralized social network."

"Sufficiently decentralized" sounds unremarkable. But in fact, Farcaster is quietly doing something significant. It is building an open social network— as user-friendly as X, but resistant to censorship, where users truly own their data. It hasn’t moved everything on-chain at the expense of user experience; instead, it has precisely decentralized only the key parts: usernames, message content, and network read/write permissions.

This is enough to ensure freedom while avoiding the various troubles that come with being fully on-chain. Anyone can develop new applications based on it, and no one can "block" you. Yes, certain front-end UIs might ban you, but you can switch platforms at any time to continue voicing your opinions. Base has natively integrated it into the new app, proving that Farcaster's approach works. I can't wait to see it launch its token.

Hyperliquid

No need to say much about this one.

But to be honest, I wasn't a true believer until OKX and Binance teamed up to suppress Hyperliquid.

Now, HYPE is no longer just a trading protocol; it is a decentralized trading movement: aiming to move all trading from centralized exchanges (CEX) to on-chain (DEX).

Surpassing Binance. Isn’t that ambition big enough? Isn’t that enough to make you dream? Currently, HL is already strong in the perpetual contract market, and I believe it will dominate the spot market in the future. Hyperliquid is writing a new story.

Polymarket

In this era, the cost of creating misinformation and spreading fake news is extremely low— almost effortless. But answering questions like "Do vaccines cause autism?" requires billions of dollars in research funding and a long time investment.

The cost of truth is very high.

In a world filled with fake news and AI-generated garbage, truly understanding "what happened" is more valuable than ever. Polymarket has already proven its value— it is more accurate than traditional media in predicting U.S. election outcomes. That’s why Polymarket is one of the protocols that makes me dare to dream. I look forward to their airdrop arriving soon.

Liquity

Since the collapse of Terra, most people have given up hope of building a "truly decentralized stablecoin." Maker has turned to traditional finance and RWA. Even the illegal stablecoin project Rai, which Vitalik once strongly advocated, has changed direction.

And Liquity may be our last chance— to achieve a truly decentralized, minimally governed stablecoin system. Although Liquity V2 is developing slowly, with a current TVL of about $136 million and an LQTY market cap of less than $100 million. From the perspective of user adoption, it still has a long way to go. But their ambition is admirable.

The crypto world will one day again need a decentralized stablecoin. Liquity may be the answer.

Fluid

I know I am their brand ambassador, but that’s precisely because Fluid is the only project I am willing to personally participate in. When they announced their goal to surpass Uniswap in trading volume— even though they are a lending protocol, I was shocked. But I was also deeply inspired. And they really did it: there was a day when Fluid's trading volume briefly surpassed Uniswap on Ethereum.

With the launch of Fluid DEX Lite, I am excited about their trading volume, lending TVL, and the price target of the FLUID token— it’s all about "taking off."

Raise Your Goals

The peak of cryptocurrency dreams was during the 2017/18 cycle.

At that time, every token held grand visions: blockchain versions of Uber, Airbnb, IoT (IOTA), supply chain management (VeChain), decentralized advertising markets (Brave), decentralized banking (Bankera), and so on. But back then, all of this was merely at the white paper stage— without real technological support.

2020/21 was different: DeFi and self-governance ideals were backed by smart contracts and truly usable dApps. However, DAO governance and true on-chain decentralization have yet to materialize: DeFi ultimately just became a financial system on-chain.

By this cycle, the market's focus has shifted to external driving forces: ETFs, tokenization of real-world assets (RWA), and regulatory compliance. As a result, our industry's dreams have become smaller, and price targets have become more conservative— even though there have been continuous positive developments over the past few years.

We are at a crossroads for the mass adoption of crypto, but many people are unwilling to hold bigger dreams. All of your target prices are set too low. Just NVIDIA alone has a market cap that exceeds the total market cap of the entire cryptocurrency market. Moreover, NVIDIA's stock price has risen 604% over the past few years.

Now, crypto is crossing the "Rubicon": pro-crypto regulatory policies are being implemented, and traditional finance is joining the race. It’s time to dream bigger and raise your target prices— raise them several times!

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