Where is the market ahead?

Author: Naly Source: moneyverse Translation: Shan Oppa, Golden Finance

The clock ticks, and the lever whistles mournfully. The flickering glimmer of expectation finally turned into a whimper that no one heard under the sky intertwined with K-lines.

How much time do you spend trying to predict the direction of the next candlestick? How many hours do you spend studying charts, dissecting narratives, tracking catalysts – all for a zero-sum game with less than 1% chance of winning?

Data may not support your so-called advantage, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a winning way in the market.

You don’t have to stumble on every trading opportunity or spend weekends chasing fleeting “excess returns”. You can anchor wise men who have gone through multiple bull and bear cycles – they have proven with iron discipline that calm concentration is far more vital than the momentary dopamine pleasure. These investors are rational and patient, and their trading framework is strong enough to withstand any storm in the market.

Lyn’s Macro Perspective

Lyn’s opinion is blunt. The strength of the U.S. economy is not comprehensive and balanced.

Excluding capital expenditure on AI and data centers, real GDP growth will fall directly from 4% to near zero. The economy is now on two speeds: artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and deficit fiscal spending are on the rise, while most other areas are faltering.

Most industries are showing fatigue. Commercial real estate is still slowly clearing, and residential real estate is trapped under the pressure of high housing prices. private equity and some venture capital fields are frozen; Although the manufacturing and service industries have not collapsed, they have no momentum to expand. This is just a round of weak cycles whitewashed by a certain noisy sector.

If you are at the top of the income pyramid, if you can personally enjoy the dividends of the artificial intelligence industry and the moisture of financial funds, you will feel that the prosperity of the world is within reach; But if you’re a young person, in debt, or an ordinary person outside the dividend circle, you’ll feel like you’re struggling in a cold and turbulent countercurrent, with whispers of every decision-making mistake this year echoing in your ears.

Student loans, demographic drags, health care costs – these mountains are overwhelming, and they are crushed before they even have time to start their lives. This is the underlying logic of the frenetic speculation we see on the chain every day: when you can’t afford to buy high-quality assets and can’t beat inflation, you will desperately look for any opportunity that might get you out of the predicament.

What people want is not a solid long-term plan, but a “jackpot” of getting rich overnight. This is why a lot of speculative money is pouring into meme coins instead of emerging infrastructure. As I wrote in my article “The Age of Overnight Riches”: Many people today are not building their portfolios at all, but are firing desperate escape speed bullets at this seemingly rigged system.

Artificial intelligence in her eyes

Lyn believes that AI has a dual attribute: it is both a real technological change and a huge bubble.

The artificial intelligence industry related to data centers has begun to reshape the working model of white-collar workers. The disruption it brings is comparable to the impact of automation on traditional factories, and over time, it will create trillions of dollars in value. But beyond this core lies a bubble of unprofitable companies that burn money just to sustain the illusion of “exponential growth”. Nvidia and large cloud service providers are exceptions, and the vast majority of participants in the ecosystem are just the “scaffolding” of this speculative game.

Lyn predicts that the artificial intelligence industry will usher in a cooling. This will not be a crash, but a two- to three-year digestion adjustment period: capital expenditure growth slows down, weaker companies are eliminated, and the entire track is reset to build up for the next round of growth.

Liquidity and Fed policy

Lyn noted that quantitative tightening is on the verge of its natural limit. Bank reserves cannot be drained indefinitely, otherwise the financial system will crack.

Her benchmark forecast is that quantitative tightening will pause and the Fed’s balance sheet will resume expansion as early as the first half of next year – a slow and low-key process. This will not be large-scale quantitative easing driven by panic, but rather structural adjustments to accommodate fiscal deficits and nominal GDP growth.

In her words, this is the era of fiscal dominance. The government sets the trajectory of fiscal spending, and the central bank eventually has to “make way” for it.

Bitcoin in Lyn’s eyes

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Bitcoin’s price has fluctuated sideways throughout the year, but Lyn believes that this is not a sign of weakness, but rather a proper gesture of a mature monetary asset.

Bitcoin spot ETF inflows have remained stable, but long-term holders are taking the opportunity to reduce their holdings and avoid risks, digesting the buying pressure in the market. Retail investors have not yet returned; The influence of the halving event has diminished, and liquidity is the key to determining the trend. Her benchmark prediction is that Bitcoin will maintain a consolidation pattern in early 2025 and reach a new all-time high in 2026 after a liquidity inflection point occurs.

Lyn also mentioned a potential long-term risk that the industry still sees as a sci-fi plot: quantum computing and AI-powered on-chain data analytics technology.

These two technologies are eroding the long-term security of transparent blockchains. Those early Bitcoin addresses with exposed public keys are the weakest link in the entire system. If we believe that Bitcoin’s mission is to exist for decades rather than just a few years, then the resilience of crypto technology will eventually become a core issue of its survival.

As she said, Bitcoin can certainly be upgraded to a quantum-resistant signature algorithm, “but this process will bring disruptive risks to decentralized systems that cannot be ignored.”

The boundaries of macro narratives are narrowing, and Bitcoin is gradually moving towards a “mature form”; The cryptocurrency space has not had a new underlying innovation paradigm for a long time; At the same time, the world we live in is becoming more transparent – everything can be tracked and analyzed by machines.

If the cryptocurrency industry has solved the feasibility of “digital currencies” in the past decade, then in the next decade, we must overcome the difficulties of private digital currencies.

Mert on privacy technology, zero-knowledge proofs, and the forgotten cornerstone of cryptocurrency

Mert opens by pointing out a core principle that the early cypherpunks never forgot: privacy was never an add-on to cryptocurrency, but an underlying premise from its birth. However, almost all mainstream public chains have abandoned this principle in pursuit of convenience and composability.

The consequence is that the entire crypto ecosystem is reduced to a transparent “glass room”. Account balances, money flows, user behavior – all information is at a glance and is permanently retained.

Zcash has chosen a very different path. It retains Bitcoin’s monetary attribute framework, but completely replaces the transparency mechanism with cryptography. Zero-knowledge proof technology hides the sender, receiver, and transfer amount of the transaction, fundamentally eliminating the possibility of identity reverse checking. For this reason, Mert believes that Zcash is currently the most resistant Layer1 project among all existing public chains.

That’s why a number of industry giants are turning their attention to it again – Naval, Ferriss, Barry Silbert, Chris Burniske, among them. Mert emphasized that this is not a momentary hype, but a sober awareness of the market: the trillions of dollars in value previously created by the cryptocurrency industry are based on the assumption that no one has the ability to analyze every transaction on the chain. Artificial intelligence technology is dismantling this assumption in real time.

Once slow and cumbersome private transactions, now smooth on mobile with Zashi Wallet; Cross-chain privacy protection functions are gradually becoming popular. The core concept of Zcash is transforming from a niche experiment to a puzzle that needs to be completed in the crypto ecosystem.

In a world where funds are on-chain, wallets are identity, and AI can track the flow of money in real time, privacy protection has become a macro hedging tool. It protects user assets, maintains token fungibility, and reduces the risk of system attacks. Privacy is no longer the icing on the cake, but a necessity for the long-term healthy development of the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

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Conclusion

Based on the views of all parties, the outline of the future is clear.

The macroeconomic pattern is narrowing. Bitcoin is gradually playing its role. The old narrative model of cryptocurrencies has dried up. What was once seen as a show-off of complete transparency is now beginning to seem like a burden in a world filled with surveillance and pattern recognition.

If the crypto industry has demonstrated the possibility of “digitally hosted assets” over the past decade, what we need to prove over the next decade is that these assets can remain secure. This security is not only to protect against the risk of code vulnerabilities or inferior token design, but also to prevent indiscriminate capture of on-chain traces by artificial intelligence, the cracking of old keys by quantum computing, and the harsh reality that permanent transparency cannot coexist with ubiquitous adversaries.

Because of this, privacy technology is no longer just a preference for niche groups, but is expected to become the next heavyweight narrative thread. This kind of privacy is by no means superficial obscurity, but true encryption protection. We need to build systems that elevate confidentiality to the same level as Bitcoin’s scarcity.

In this track, Zcash is particularly positioned. It not only replicates Bitcoin’s monetary model but also incorporates zero-knowledge proof technology at the underlying protocol layer. At the same time, it is one of the few public chains that takes quantum risk seriously at the beginning of the project’s design, rather than treating it as a problem to be solved later.

Of course, all this is not Zcash’s “guaranteed victory”. For a narrative to become a reality, it requires developers, capital and users to work together. However, if value continues to migrate on-chain in the future, and quantum computing technology will indeed achieve breakthroughs within 10-30 years, then it is difficult to imagine that privacy digital currencies will not become a core part of the crypto ecosystem.

If everything can be on the chain, how can privacy protection be absent?