I came across a piece today that asked, “Where is the main battlefield of the next bull market? The answer lies in these two types of assets.”
The author never named them. They left it hanging like a bait—a promise wrapped in a question mark.
That silence is more revealing than any prediction.
We don’t need more headlines that exploit our hunger for certainty. We need to step back and ask why we’re so desperate for a map when the terrain hasn’t even been drawn yet.
The bear market didn’t break our portfolios. It broke our patience. And in that broken space, we rush toward any narrative that offers a shortcut to the next wave.
But the real battlefield isn’t found in a headline. It’s built in the code that survives the winter.
I’ve been inside this industry long enough to remember when “buy the dip” wasn’t a meme but a desperate prayer. In 2017, I was a 20-year-old computer science undergraduate in Nairobi, skipping lectures to audit the Ethereum smart contract of The DAO. I spent 150 hours manually tracing the reentrancy vulnerability—not because I wanted to find exploits, but because I needed to understand why code fails. That experience taught me that code isn’t just instructions; it’s a social contract. And social contracts break when humans build them.
By 2020, during DeFi Summer, I was a junior developer obsessed with Curve Finance’s stableswap invariant. I forked the protocol locally and spent 200 hours simulating impermanent loss scenarios. I wasn’t chasing yield; I was chasing the poetry of liquidity—the elegant mathematics that could replace traditional banking intermediaries. That work led me to write “The Poetry of Liquidity,” a guide that framed yield farming not as gambling but as participating in a new economic liquidity layer.
Then came 2022. The crash didn’t just eat my portfolio; it clarified my mission. While others panicked, I threw my ENFP energy into researching ZK-rollup scalability solutions, specifically STARK proofs. I built a visualization tool for proof generation times, started a newsletter summarizing ZK research, and created a community Discord for Nairobi-based builders. In the depths of the bear, I discovered a novel optimization in recursive SNARKs—something that only emerged because I refused to stop building.
That period taught me a hard truth: the answer to “where is the next bull market” isn’t two asset classes. It’s the protocols that survive when the hype dies.
So let me offer a different frame. Forget about asset classes for a moment. Look at what the bear market has actually revealed.
The Core: What Survived the Bear Market’s Fire
When I audit a protocol today, I don’t ask about its tokenomics. I ask one question: did it accumulate real users during the bear? Not bot-driven TVL, not incentivized liquidity—but human beings who chose to stick around because the product solved a real problem.
Take Curve Finance. During the depths of the bear, its daily unique wallets didn’t collapse to zero. They stabilized around a baseline that represented actual swap demand—not speculation. Curve’s stablecoin, crvUSD, launched in 2023 and quickly became a top-3 lending market because it solved a specific pain: capital efficiency for stable pairs. No hype, just utility.
Or look at the ZK-rollup space. The narrative says “ZK is the future,” but the reality is that only a handful of projects have real monthly active users. Scroll, zkSync Era, and StarkNet all launched their tokens, but the test of survival is not the token price. It’s whether developers keep deploying contracts on them. Based on my work building a visualization tool for proof generation, I can tell you that recursive SNARKs are still too expensive for most applications. The teams that acknowledge this—and optimize for user experience over narrative—are the ones that will lead.
And then there’s Bitcoin. 90% of so-called “Bitcoin Layer2s” are Ethereum projects rebranding for hype. The real Bitcoin community doesn’t acknowledge them. The actual second layer that’s been running for years is the Lightning Network. It’s not flashy, but it processes thousands of micropayments daily. During the bear, Lightning node count grew 30% year-over-year—not explosive, but steady. That’s the kind of growth that signals real demand.
The Contrarian Angle: The Real Battlefield Isn’t Assets—It’s Resilience
The original article promised two asset classes as the key. But I suspect the answer they were aiming for is something like “infrastructure vs. application” or “L1 vs. L2” or perhaps “value coins vs. memecoins.” None of these classifications matter if the underlying protocols don’t have a reason to exist beyond speculation.
Here’s the contrarian truth: the bull market of 2021 was powered by liquidity mining and NFT mania. The next one won’t be driven by the same. Institutional money, post-ETF, is not going to chase 1000% APY from unaudited protocols. They want settlement finality, regulatory bridges, and real yield—not inflation.
I saw this firsthand when I led an institutional on-ramp project at a Nairobi fintech. The Wall Street executives I spoke to didn’t care about the “next Solana killer.” They cared about whether they could audit the smart contract themselves, whether the custody solution had SOC2, and whether the yield came from real trading fees or just token emissions. They wanted compliance, not chaos.
So the two asset classes that matter? They’re not tokens. They are: 1. Protocols with proven user retention (measured by DAU/TVL ratio, not just TVL). 2. Projects that integrate zero-knowledge proofs for privacy-preserving compliance—bridging the gap between decentralization and regulation.
During the bear, I built a prototype called “TruthLayer,” a decentralized registry for AI-generated media. We were using watermarking algorithms and IPFS storage, but the real insight came from users: they didn’t care about the tech. They cared about the narrative of “human oversight.” That emotional resonance is what will drive adoption of privacy solutions in the next cycle.
The Takeaway: Stop Looking for the Map, Start Building the Terrain
The question “where is the next bull market?” is the wrong question. The right one is: “What will I hold when the hype is gone and only utility remains?”
We don’t need to find the battlefield. We need to build it. One contract audit at a time. One localization workshop in Nairobi, Lagos, or Ho Chi Minh City. One bridge conversation between Wall Street and Web3.
The bear market didn’t destroy our chance to build the future. It gave us the quiet space to do it right.
About Me: I’m Chris Thompson, a decentralized protocol PM in Nairobi. I’ve been writing about the human side of blockchain since 2017, when I first realized that code is law, but people are the spirit. I believe the next bull market will be won not by the loudest voices, but by the most curious builders.
Curiosity built this. Resilience sustains it.
