Author: mo

Translation: Deep Tide TechFlow

Deep Tide Reading: The biggest winners of the next cycle may be projects that most people completely fail to understand—bad names, weak narratives, random communities, yet they just soar. Because AI is changing how retail investors discover projects, attention is becoming increasingly fragmented, and projects are beginning to optimize data performance for algorithms rather than humans. This means that the next round is not just about finding the best narratives, but understanding how narratives are discovered.

I have been thinking about one thing:

In the next cycle, many winners will emerge that most people completely do not understand.

Not the kind that is commonly misunderstood in cryptocurrency. I mean: bad names, weak narratives, random communities, coins that have almost no presence on CT, yet just explode. And they might rise very early.

My basic judgment is that many significant trends in the next cycle will not be discovered merely by keeping an eye on the timeline and following the crowd as they have in the past. The market is changing the way attention is discovered, the direction in which funds flow, and the ways retail investors decide what to buy.

This is important, because if I am correct, the next cycle is not just about finding the best narrative.

But about understanding how narratives are discovered.

I believe this process is already changing.

1. The discovery mechanism is changing

In past cycles, the attention in cryptocurrency primarily flowed through a few obvious channels.

CT, Telegram, Discord, KOLs, group chats, local opinion leaders, a few big accounts, a few noisy communities, a few narratives that everyone sees at the same time.

These are still important. I do not believe they will disappear.

But I do believe the next cycle will be different, as more retail investors have begun to rely on AI to help them make decisions. People are asking AI what is trending, what has momentum, what is undervalued, which sectors are heating up, which coins are attracting attention.

This is likely to continue to grow.

Once this becomes the norm, the rules of the game change. Projects are no longer just competing for human attention. They also need to compete to appear appealing in the systems people use to filter the market.

This is a different game.

The question is no longer just "who has the best promoters," but rather "which projects look best from a machine perspective that people use to simplify the market."

This is important.

2. The distribution mechanism is changing

I also believe that attention in the next cycle will be more fragmented than before.

CT is still important, but I do not think it will dominate like it used to, at least not relatively.

My point is simple. The absolute number of users on X may still be growing, but if retail investors start spending more time elsewhere, its influence in the market may be shrinking.

It could be social trading apps. It could be AI-assisted discovery tools. It could be people spending more time in local Telegram groups, WeChat circles, or app-based trading communities, instead of being glued to CT all day.

If applications like FOMO continue to grow, more retail capital flows might form within these ecosystems, long before they become evident on the timeline.

This makes the market harder to interpret based solely on social feelings.

In the last cycle, many traders felt that as long as they were sufficiently online, connected, and following the right people, they could get close to the flow of attention.

The next cycle may not be so forgiving.

You could be very online but still miss what is truly rising.

3. Performance is changing

I think this part is more interesting.

If discovery becomes more fragmented and more reliant on AI, and if there are more assets competing for the same pool of speculative attention, the market begins to reward different things.

You may have to be willing to trade or invest in things that seem dumber than ideas that succeeded last time.

Not because the market is broken. Not because fundamentals no longer matter. But because in cryptocurrency, attention remains one of the purest drivers of price, especially in the early stages of a trend.

Attention does not always flow to the smartest things.

Sometimes it flows to the easiest to understand, the easiest to replicate, the easiest to turn into memes, or the easiest to appear in streams, scanners, or AI responses.

This means that some of the highest-returning coins in the next cycle may look quite ridiculous.

Bad names. Bad ideas. Bad narratives. Huge returns.

This sounds silly, but I think it is true.

The AI layer creates a new game

This is what I believe most people underestimate.

If more retail investors use AI to find opportunities, then teams will ultimately try to optimize for that.

Not just for CT share. Not just for KOL influence. Not just for on-chain heat.

They may start trying to appear attractive in the data layers relied upon by AI tools and scanners.

This could mean better-looking surface metrics, cleaner momentum, clearer capital flows, better interaction signals, more appealing volumes, more attractive appearances.

Yes, in some cases, this may also mean teams trying to create illusions of momentum that ordinary traders do not easily notice.

Ordinary traders see the surface and assume it is real.

This is the risk.

Some things look healthy from afar, but their actual quality is much worse than it appears.

This is why I think the next cycle will reward those who can distinguish real attraction from machine-readable attraction.

The two are not always the same.

Why I think traders need better tools in the next cycle

If this argument is correct, then the edge in the next cycle may not just come from "getting the right accounts' attention earlier."

But more about:

Tracking where attention is actually flowing

Tracking where funds are actually flowing

Differentiating real participation from fake strength

Understanding whether a trend is supported by real demand or just looks good on paper

In other words, the surface of the market may become more deceptive.

If more discovery happens through AI, social trading apps, fragmented communities, and machine-filtered interfaces, then mere opinions become less useful. You need better systems.

This might be where having your own tools starts to become more important.

Not because tools can magically make you smarter, but because the next cycle may reward those traders who can measure attention and capital flow better than average people—those relying on timelines, feelings, and KOL posts.

Meme coins may still grow, but marginal returns are diminishing

I still believe meme coins will continue to be significant in the next cycle.

I do not think this sector will disappear.

But I do believe the nature of the upward space is changing.

The simplest way to put it is:

The meme coin sector as a whole can grow while the upward space for individual winners shrinks.

This is the key point.

In 2021, there were far fewer meme coins competing for attention and liquidity. Winners had more space to dominate the market. Doge and Shiba reached absurd market capitalizations because speculative energy was more concentrated.

By 2024 and 2025, the number of meme coins exploded. Supply increased significantly. New issues appeared continuously. Attention was diluted across a broader range. Even so, we still saw major performers like Pepe, but the broader pattern has felt more fragmented.

This may be the direction in which things continue to evolve.

In the next cycle, we may have more meme coins than in 2024 and 2025. The total market value of the sector can still grow. There can still be huge trades. There can still be major winners.

But it seems unlikely to me that any single meme coin will dominate the market as Doge or Shiba did in 2021.

More supply. More fragmentation. Faster rotation. More competition for the same attention.

This often means that the sector can continue to grow while fewer individual winners can achieve that monster-level increase.

What this means for traders

If I had to sum all this up in one practical piece of advice, it would be:

The next cycle may reward adaptability rather than taste.

Many traders will struggle if they continue to try to force the market to operate the way they want it to.

You may need to adapt to a few things.

First, you may have to trade things that feel dumb.

Second, you may need to rely less on obvious CT consensus and more on tools, capital flow, and attention tracking.

Third, you may need to be better at judging whether a trend is real or just looks real.

Fourth, you may need to accept that some of the biggest winners will not come from the cleanest narratives.

They may come from whatever attracts retail investors most easily once the attention loop starts to self-reinforce.

This is not a moral judgment. It’s just how these markets operate.

What could prove this incorrect

I do not think this is inevitable.

There are a few ways this view could be wrong.

First, CT may be stronger than I expect because even though AI helps discovery, narratives may still need human amplification to genuinely spread.

Second, AI tools may ultimately mainly reflect the same public information that everyone has already seen, which means the discovery layer may not change as much as I think.

Third, even in a more crowded meme market, if a coin captures culture strongly enough and becomes the obvious protagonist of the cycle, it may still produce a super winner.

Fourth, if retail participation is overall weaker than expected, then fragmentation may not be as important, simply because there isn’t as much broad speculative energy to dilute.

So I am not saying this is inevitable.

I am saying this setup is there, and I believe the market is moving in that direction.

Final thoughts

My core point is simple:

The surface of the next bull market may feel more random, but the underlying competition is fiercer.

AI-assisted discovery may become more important. Retail attention may become more fragmented. Projects will increasingly compete not just for human mind share, but for machine-readable relevance. Meme coins may still thrive, but each winner will face more dilution and less concentrated upward space.

If this happens, then the advantage in the next cycle may not come from having the loudest opinions.

But from understanding how attention is routed, where funds are actually flowing, and which trends are real rather than just well-packaged.

The best traders may not be the ones with the best opinions.

But perhaps the ones with the best systems to track when attention turns into actual capital flows.