Upbeat, deep-house trance music drifts from the speakers in a darkened room here at the Tel Aviv Expo. Around me… a sea of geeks, noses buried in laptops.
This is a so-called “hacker house”—an event that brings together software developers, business-development professionals, and founders of crypto projects. This one in particular is focused on the Solana blockchain.
I popped down to Israel from Prague last weekend to attend this four-day hacker house, not because I’m a developer, a biz-dev pro, or a crypto founder. I’m here because I wanted to take the pulse of “crypto winter” by way of one of its most significant blockchains.
And what I’ve heard over the last three days—during the expo and in the numerous sidebar conversations—tells me crypto winter is dead. The next crypto bull run is already here. It’s up and stretching its legs. And those with the foresight to lay away some crypto now will gather up meaningful wealth in a new bull market that has already begun under the surface of this bear market.
The mood here is palpably bullish.
Probably summed up best by a founder who said, “I’m never more excited to build than during a bear market.” The reason: Bear markets always yield to bull markets. And when the next bull market arrives, the projects building today—and investors investing today—will see big returns.
It’s no different than in the real world.
Builders Building Is a Sign Crypto Winter Is Dead
I’ve noted this before, but Microsoft, Ford, Netflix, and scores of other household names all started in bad economies. And any number of academic studies have shown that investors who earn the biggest returns are those who buck the mood of the moment. They put their cash to work when the rest of Wall Street is wringing its hands with worry.
This crypto winter—the last year or so of death and destruction—has certainly been a bummer.
But I’ve not once been worried about my crypto wealth. In fact, I’ve been buying and buying and buying throughout this entire bear market. To such a degree that if Solana returns to all-time highs, and if bitcoin dashes past $100,000, my crypto wealth will afford an apartment in Portugal (where I’m moving soon). And it leaves me with excess cash to stash away for retirement.
Yes, that’s an “if,” for sure.
“If” crypto returns to previous highs.
But personally, I’m confident that’s already written in the stars. What I heard at the Tel Aviv Hacker House tells me I’m right.
The way the blockchain is expanding beyond simply trading cryptocurrencies or digital art says we’re on the cusp of mass adoption.
One project here offers a unique way to invest in real estate markets like New York, Denver, and Miami Beach. Based on per-square-foot pricing tied to real-time real estate transactions, investors can bet on whether specific housing markets rise or fall.
That’s an entirely new way to invest in real estate. Better yet, you can invest with less than a dollar, or more than a million dollars—not something easily accomplished on Wall Street. That’s already attracting institutional investors and will clearly bring in retail investors in time.
Another company is tying real-world consumer purchases like shoes, high-end watches, and even kids’ toys to NFTs. That’s opening vast new opportunities for companies to deepen consumer loyalty. It also provides a new corporate income stream. And it gives consumers are a new venue for interacting with their favorite brands.
There was even talk of using NFTs to buy, sell, and trade barrels of whiskey and rum on the blockchain. Or to authenticate luxury goods like pricey bottles of wine and Louis Vuitton handbags with NFTs. Or to grant anonymity when paying online, meaning “cookies” that track us across the internet are a dead man walking.
The Next Crypto Bull Run Will Bring Mass Adoption
What I’m saying is that we’re approaching a tipping point in which crypto in various forms, as well as the blockchain itself, is going to be a standard part of our daily lives. In many ways, it will be unseen… just part of the infrastructure of living.
You won’t have to know about crypto or NFTs to interact with them. You won’t have to create crypto wallets on your own, or even interact with them. Projects will create those wallets in the background for you and allow you to manage them if you want to, or totally ignore them if you want to.
The developers and founders here are crystal clear in their vision that today’s bear market is a non-entity. That the future is predetermined at this point, and it orbits the blockchain.
For me, the way to benefit from that future is to own exposure to it. And, granted, I own deeper exposure than most across cryptocurrencies and NFTs.
But the simplest way to profit is to just own major cryptos such as bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and some others. They will do exceptionally well in this post-crypto winter bull market that’s already awake and waiting for its moment to run again.