From Infrastructure to Consumer Applications: The New Frontier of the Crypto Market

In recent years, the focus of the encryption industry has gradually shifted from infrastructure construction to consumer-oriented application development. As the core technological architecture matures, the market is starting to pay more attention to how to transform blockchain technology into products and services that ordinary users can directly use. This shift marks the industry entering a new stage of development.

Market Background

The current crypto market shows the following characteristics:

1. The growth of liquidity has slowed down. The total market capitalization of stablecoins is only about 25% higher than the peak in 2021, with new funds primarily coming from institutional investors rather than retail speculative capital.

2. The regulatory environment is becoming clearer. The crypto-friendly policies of the Trump administration and legislation on stablecoins have cleared some obstacles for the industry's development.

3. The technical infrastructure is becoming increasingly完善. The significant investments in new public chains, scaling solutions, and other areas over the past few years have ensured that the technical architecture basically meets the application development needs.

Analysis of Consumer Application Track

The main consumer application tracks that have formed a product-market fit ( PMF ) include:

1. Trading/Perpetual Contract Platforms: such as Hyperliquid, Axiom, etc.
2. Token issuance platforms: such as Pump.fun, BelieveApp, etc.
3. Information Trading and Prediction Markets: such as Polymarket, Kaito, etc.

These projects generally have significant revenue and user scale, far exceeding some infrastructure projects with huge financing amounts but lacking practical use cases.

The consumption application tracks expected to grow in the future include:

1. One-stop encryption financial super application, integrating functions such as deposits, withdrawals, DeFi, etc.
2. Blockchain-based entertainment/social platform, replacing advertising models with on-chain monetization mechanisms.

The AI and gaming sectors are still in their early stages, and there have not yet been any truly blockbuster applications.

Investment Strategy Recommendations

1. Focus on consumer applications that can attract Web2 users, have actual revenue and a user base, rather than purely technical projects.

2. Emphasize the project's distribution capability, user experience, and brand building; these factors are often more critical in the consumer sector than the technology itself.

3. Focus on a few consumer-oriented "super chain" ecosystems, such as Solana, Hyperliquid, etc., and their killer applications.

4. Evaluate the project from a business perspective: examine real revenue and scalable business models, rather than focusing solely on technological innovation.

5. For Web2 native projects, look for products that seamlessly integrate encryption technology in the backend without overly emphasizing the "encryption" attribute.

Overall, the excess returns in the crypto market over the next few years are likely to come from transforming blockchain technology into consumer applications aimed at millions of ordinary users, rather than purely infrastructure development. Investors need to adjust their thinking and assess project potential more from the consumer perspective.