The most criticized thing about the crypto industry is that its large-scale application scenarios are limited.

Currently, there are only three uses for crypto that may be widely accepted by the market: value storage (Bitcoin), stablecoins, and transactions (speculation).

Since the application scenarios cannot be realized, many investors can only invest in infrastructure.

Therefore, the returns of infrastructure projects are also good, and the long-term holding returns of top projects are quite touching.

However, the ultimate goal of infrastructure is to support the user's application scenarios. If there are no terminal application scenarios, these infrastructures are like building a castle in the air.

Infrastructure is no longer to blame

In the early days of crypto, developers of practical applications complained about the poor crypto infrastructure: slow transaction speed, high cost, and cross-chain is a pitfall.

For the developers of infrastructure, there is a clear direction of development: increase speed, reduce costs, and propose various cross-chain solutions.

With the development of public chain technology, many chains can achieve more than tens of thousands of concurrent transactions per second, and the settlement time is only a few seconds.

In terms of cross-chain, Chainlink's CCIP directly handles cross-chain interactions, and various re-pledge projects can realize cross-chain asset interest.

It can be said that the performance of the infrastructure has been greatly improved so far. If killer application scenarios do not appear again, then the relationship with the infrastructure should not be so great.

In theory, encrypted application scenarios can only appear in two directions:

The first category is the upgrade of encryption to traditional Internet authentication scenarios

The second category is new scenarios that can only be realized through encryption

The three most likely traditional scenarios to be successfully upgraded

The currently popular social/game/payment scenarios all belong to the first category.

Two months ago, Farcaster, known as the encrypted Twitter, completed a financing of 150 million US dollars, with a valuation of 1 billion US dollars!

However, the total number of users of this project Farcaster is less than 600,000, and the number of daily active users has increased 28 times from 2,000 at the beginning of the year to 56,000 at present.

As a social platform, this daily activity is almost not competitive.

Relatively speaking, the possibility of breakthroughs in payment and gaming scenarios is greater:

Recently, Uber and Ferrari have announced that they will accept cryptocurrency as a payment method,

Tesla, Apple, Coca-Cola, Pizza Hut, Gucci, etc., have actually supported cryptocurrency payments for a long time.

Another scenario that is expected to break through is games. At present, the total valuation of all Gamefi projects is 17.8 billion US dollars, which is similar to the market value of Dogecoin.

At present, there are hot super casual games in the telegram ecosystem, from NOT to hamster fighting, and last week's coin is Pixeltap, all of which have reached a million daily active users in one month.

However, the users of these super casual games are mainly for the airdrop money-making effect. After the airdrop, I am afraid that the life cycle of the game will be almost over.

However, there are still several large-scale crypto games worth looking forward to in the second half of this year. For example, Shrapnel is a 3A masterpiece and will also be unveiled at this year's ChinaJoy.

Explore crypto scenarios

The exploration of new crypto scenarios may be the most difficult to upgrade than traditional scenarios.

The difficulty lies in the uncertainty of demand.

Depin (distributed devices) may be one of the scenarios. Before the emergence of the crypto industry, the traditional Internet actually had a "sharing economy".

"Sharing economy" is a centralized company that provides basic services for multiple users. For example, in the case of shared bikes and shared power banks, the provision and maintenance of infrastructure is provided by a centralized company.

The opposite is true for "distributed devices", where ordinary users provide equipment and maintenance, while the platform looks for paying customers.

In this cycle, Render, which provides computing power rendering scenes, became an Apple supplier, and Aethir found a leading game company as a customer.

These platforms allow users to make money by using the idle GPU devices of their home computers.

Another new scenario that has received capital recognition is the prediction market. The Polymarket project has raised a total of US$74 million, and the latest round of leading investment is led by the famous Founders Fund of the Paypal gang, followed by Vitalik Buterin.

It is said that Polymarket's predictions are more reliable than polls, because polls are filled out randomly, while Polymarket's winning rate is the result of retail investors' real money:

Polymarket's transaction volume in June reached US$109 million, a record high; at the same time, the platform's monthly active users reached 29,200, also setting a historical record.

However, whether it is Depin or other innovative scenarios on the chain, from the data point of view, there is still a certain distance from the emergence of "killer" large-scale application scenarios. In the short term, games or payments are more likely.

However, once "killer" large-scale application scenarios appear, investors who can identify these opportunities will most likely be able to achieve wealth freedom.