Reflection on 2024 Encryption Investment Strategies: Balancing Technology and Community

In reviewing my investment experience for 2024, I found that I primarily adopted the all-weather investment principle, diversifying funds across various cycles that impact the encryption market. At the same time, I followed a barbell strategy, focusing on allocating high Beta assets in Alpha tracks and high Alpha assets in Beta tracks.

My Alpha assets in the investment portfolio are mainly concentrated in chain abstraction, AI Agent, and PayFi projects. This configuration helped my overall return surpass the market in December. However, while adjusting the portfolio for the first quarter of 2025, I realized that my Alpha asset allocation logic was too singular, primarily revolving around the "disruptive innovation" theme of technology.

Recently, I started reflecting on this investment strategy. In the field of encryption investment, there are actually two main investment logics: technological determinism and community supremacy. As a rational investor, I often view the community atmosphere and cult of personality as noise and pay little attention to them.

However, I recently purchased an NFT because I am optimistic about the chain abstraction track, which allowed me to experience the community atmosphere for the first time as a participant rather than a bystander. This experience made me feel a long-lost sense of belonging and acceptance. Inspired by this, I started trying to learn about some projects with a strong community atmosphere, such as Monad, Sonic SVM, MegaETH, and BeraChain.

It is particularly worth mentioning Sonic SVM, which is the first instance of Sonic's Solana L2 Stack architecture HyperGrid, positioned as a Web3 version of TikTok, targeting Gen Z gaming consumers on TikTok. Six months ago, I analyzed Sonic, but at that time, I did not realize the true value of consumer chains and community atmosphere. From a technical perspective, although Sonic's HyperGrid is meaningful, it is not as striking as other new L2 technologies.

However, looking back at the operational status and community maturity of Sonic SVM after half a year, compared to those L2s with advanced technology, Sonic SVM has shown significant advantages in building and promoting large-scale adoption of Web3 aimed at consumers.

Currently, Sonic SVM is developing a TikTok application layer called SonicX, which plans to airdrop its native token to all users registered through TikTok. With the help of account abstraction technology, TikTok users can directly experience on-chain interactions within the app without needing to configure an additional Web3 wallet, and complete the airdrop collection.

SonicX has attracted over 2 million users to participate in in-app games, challenges, and live broadcasts through advanced TikTok advertising and creator collaborations, creating a seamless experience similar to Web2. In addition, Sonic SVM plans to integrate more games on its platform, gradually building the "TikTok chain" ecosystem, where eligible users can receive token rewards during the airdrop period.

Given that TikTok has over 1.5 billion global users and the lifetime value of users is significantly higher than that of other social platforms, this demonstrates the enormous monetization potential of the TikTok user base. Unlike the chaotic situations seen with certain previous social platform mini-programs, we seemingly do not have to worry about the scenario of exchanging precious market liquidity for a large number of low-value users.

Recalling what a senior told me when I worked at a small encryption fund: "One main line of value investment is 'entering the large market'." After completing initial innovations, whoever can better occupy a larger market through rapid replication and strengthening of the growth flywheel may become the ultimate winner. In the current situation where the supply of blockchain infrastructure has already exceeded demand, whoever can reach consumers faster, and whoever can occupy consumers' minds more, may become the next era's Web3 infrastructure leader.