It’s becoming more obvious that crypto actually comes with *more* scrutiny now than stocks Memes used to be acceptable, AI agent coins were a fun “meta” Even coins with revenue look stupid compared to stocks. 🧵 TLDR: SOV, stablecoins are the only pmf

Rampant speculation will always occur, yes, but I suggest you only play this game in easy mode, otherwise it’s really not worth the risk Crypto used to be ideal for this, but between years of VC scams, memes and trump extraction People aren’t falling for it

The only way playing crypto trenches is going to make sense is during very short isolated windows after a massive liquidity event (ie majors up) or something novel to fool people with comes out Otherwise r/r isn’t there

largely, people don’t trust crypto and it’s reputation is Irreparably damaged Most people tried crypto in 2021 and lost everything they put in Most people that do hold crypto only hold BTC ETH or maybe SOL to “diversify”

Anyone left going down the risk curve is either a normie buying XRP and ADA still Or on the spectrum and playing around in CT metas

The problem is that the people active in crypto are too hyper aware of the fact coins go to 0, nothing lasts OGs always knew this, but that was okay because new entrants to fool kept coming Not this time though, which makes the PA make a lot of sense

The only coins that get bid are coins where there’s some sort of belief that maybe, just maybe, there’s real potential/value Perp dexes, Pump, zora, etc But the competition is ruthless and likely will get eaten by giants like Robinhood

Especially once you can buy dividend bearing stocks that have strict reporting standards, decades of growth and IP protections, real ownership rights etc It becomes harder to justify buying a coin that gives you none of that at similar or worse multiples

Honestly it’s a sign the asset class is maturing and you can’t get away with crazy prices because people are starting to understand how to value these things

Which brings me back to the main point: Store of Value (SOV) and Stablecoins are the *ONLY* pmf in crypto currently

Yes networks like ETH SOL MONAD are very cool and will enable interesting things like tokenization But is being a gas token really a multi-Trillion dollar proposition? Idk the r/r doesn’t make sense to me personally though if BTC pumps the top L1s ofc will pump speculatively

Stablecoins people understand the use case for but there’s really no asset to hold to benefit from this without extra noise

Which just leaves SOV Obviously that’s $BTC, the pristine, most decentralized, best distributed supply, most Lindy and resilient network in all of crypto by a long shot It’s easily the *only* asset in crypto you can “set and forget” and at this point has 0 competitors

However, there are 2 main problems with BTC 1) Privacy 2) Long term fee budget 2 things even the most die hard bitcoiners can’t logically claim bitcoin has solved

You can argue privacy is not needed but Satoshi and the rest of the cypherpunks that started all of this would disagree with you Freedom and individual liberty is goal is it not? If you don’t get it I don’t have time to explain, but privacy is a human right

And the long term fee budget is the problem of What happens when mining rewards keep getting halved to the point it’s no longer worth it for validators to secure the network? Most bitcoiners say that usage of the network and tx fees will cover this

Given the BTC throughput it’s hard to see fees alone securing the network, but to be fair this problem is far away Interestingly, I think ZK dramatically improves both these issues BTC faces

It’s obvious that ZK solves the privacy aspect but it also improves throughput with the latest cryptography improvements study zcash and its project tachyon upgrade coming within 6-12 months Recommend @zooko @ebfull @0xMert_ Twitter feeds to start down the rabbit hole

Then study the lore behind zcash if you don’t understand the intellectual capital behind zcash (see quoted tweet, dyor as well)

Given this and the fact SOV is the only proven product market fit in crypto $ZEC is uniquely positioned as a 9 year old POW coin with privacy vertically integrated and ZK used to scale as well

While it remains to be seen if cryptography can adequately “bolt on” privacy to L2s or protocols It remains true that BTC should have privacy ZEC is literally that, just 7 years behind in terms of POW Distribution

So in terms of being a “private SOV” ZEC is clearly well positioned And I don’t think there’s honestly anything else left that could 100x with size in cryto Unless BTC core (a mess rn BTC) decides to implement privacy A bet on ZEC and giga brains behind it, is a good bet