2024 investment experience summary: how to allocate reasonably and outperform the market?

Author: NingNing

To sum up my personal 24 years of investment experience, it is to copy Ray Dalio's all-weather investment principles and diversify the investment portfolio into every cycle that affects the cryptocurrency market (seasonal cycles within a year, 4-year bull and bear cycles, Gartner technology innovation cycle, Merrill Lynch clock cycle), and follow Nassim Taleb's barbell strategy, focusing on allocating Alpha assets in the Beta race track.

So, now in my investment portfolio, Alpha assets such as Chain Abstraction, AI Agent, and PayFi projects are the main focus. The addition of these assets has helped my overall portfolio yield easily outperform the market in December. When rebalancing the portfolio to capture the Q1 Alpha returns of 25 years at the end of the year, I suddenly realized that my Alpha asset allocation logic is relatively simple, solely revolving around the theme logic of technological "disruptive innovation".

After hearing some remarks from the co-founder of MegaETH, Bing Xiong, about the Vibe community on Space recently, I lay in bed at night and reflected on it.

In the field of crypto investment, there are actually two investment logics, one is the so-called technological determinism, and the other is community supremacy.

Usually, as a non-hypothetical rational person, I generally regard community Vibe, Cult culture and other such things as noise created by big liars and little fools for mutual benefit, and I don't care much about them.

But recently, due to my interest in the consumer chain Abstract of the chain abstraction track, I started with the Fat Penguin NFT. This is the first time I have experienced the Vibe community as a participant rather than an onlooker. This experience has given me a sense of social belonging and community acceptance that I haven't felt in a long time. Inspired by the viewpoints of the Binance brothers, I started to consciously break through my original cognitive cocoon and tried to understand projects with a strong community vibe, such as Monad, Sonic SVM, MegaETH, BeraChain, etc.

Sonic SVM is the first instance of Sonic's Solana L2 Stack architecture HyperGrid. Its positioning is Web3 TikTok Chain, targeting millions of Z-generation game consumers on TikTok.

Before, I wrote a research report for Sonic (see retweet), and the theory of 'split plate' by the disk master has always been in my mind when writing. Frankly speaking, at that time, I did not realize the true value of narrative such as consumer chain/community Vibe, and from a technical perspective, Sonic's HyperGrid makes sense, but it is far less sexy than new L2 technical primitives such as Preconf, Based Rollup, parallel EVM, etc.

However, after half a year, when comparing the operational status and community maturity of Sonic SVM with those L2s that have sexy technical jargon, you will find a huge gap in product and results between building for consumers and abstracting Web3 Mass adoption.

The current Sonic SVM is building a TikTok App Layer - SonicX, which will airdrop its native token $SONIC to all users who register through TikTok. With the support of Account Abstraction, TikTok users can directly experience on-chain interaction within the application without the need to separately configure a Web3 wallet, and complete the airdrop claim on the TikTok platform.

SonicX has attracted over 2 million users to participate in games, challenges, and live broadcasts within the app through advanced advertising and creator collaborations with TikTok, creating a seamless experience similar to Web2. In addition, Sonic SVM plans to integrate more games on TikTok Chain and gradually build an ecosystem. Eligible users can receive token rewards during the airdrop period.

TikTok has 1.5 billion+ global users, Telegram has 900 million global users, but the user lifetime value of TikTok is much higher than Telegram's. A while ago, ChillGuy's crazy speculation showed us the monetization potential of TikTok users. It seems that we don't need to worry about the chaos like the Telegram mini-program before, which ultimately only traded precious market liquidity for a bunch of low-value junk users.

When I was working in a small crypto fund 23 years ago, a senior told me that a major theme in value investment is 'go to big market'. After completing the 0-1 innovation, whoever can better occupy a larger market through rapid replication + reinforced growth flywheel will be the ultimate winner. Now that even Vitalik feels that the blockchain infra is oversupplied, whoever can reach consumers faster, occupy more of consumers' minds, will be the next era's Web3 Infra.