Crypto 2029: The ultimate prediction of the crypto industry's four-year cycle
By Luke
Compiled by Saoirse, Foresight News
You're on the eve of one of the biggest changes in cryptocurrency history, and if you want to continue to cultivate the industry, you must keep an eye on everything that's happening right now.
Currently, the entire industry has three core problems:
What determines the value of a token?
How to implement various cutting-edge technologies into the blockchain ecosystem?
What will happen to the market when cryptocurrencies stop being a standalone asset and become the underlying infrastructure of traditional finance?
I can simply analyze these three questions one by one from a theoretical level. There are countless people doing this every day, but empty talk can never reach a conclusion. Therefore, I plan to change the method: sort out the actual changes that will occur in the industry from now to 2029 in stages. The content is specific subjects, data, and time points. The content is sufficiently specific. After three years, everyone can go back and verify whether my judgment is accurate. This is just one of many future possibilities; some deductions are bound to go wrong. But vague and empty predictions of the future cannot be falsified, and opinions that cannot be falsified have no value. I'd rather give clear but potentially erroneous judgments than say empty words that are ambiguous and will never roll over.
This predictive perspective comes from my work scenario: I have long been deeply involved in the intersection of crypto startups, industry regulation, and venture capital, and have in-depth communication with alternative asset managers and fund allocators every week. This doesn't mean that my judgment is necessarily correct, but my deduction fully takes into account the various constraints in reality.
Mid-2026: Premium tokens will no longer be all kinds of tokens
By mid-2026, before the market uniformly defined token value standards, the non-public enterprise perpetual contract market had reached the point of convergence in the product market.
This transformation began with the Hyperliquid platform. SpaceX's non-public perpetual contract launched on the platform was criticized in the early days due to Ventuals' malicious liquidation and manipulation of the market, but later it became the price reference target with the highest attention in the primary and secondary markets. By July, major banks and hedge funds will refer to this contract to price their private equity assets. Trading software for ordinary users such as Robinhood will also use it to predict the opening price of the company after listing. Every few weeks before a large company goes public, the price of this perpetual contract will accurately match the final opening price. The degree of accuracy makes the investment bank underwriting team that charges a seven-digit service fee and is responsible for pricing lose face. OpenAI's perpetual contract holdings with Anthropic have reached a new high. Over a period of time, this native crypto exchange became the most reliable channel in the world to obtain real-time valuations from leading unlisted companies.
At the same time, a basic question arises in the minds of ordinary traders: How can the rest of the various currencies on the chain continue to be traded? The altcoin market has continued to rise for 18 months. The project's founding team and investment institutions continued to leave the market through large-scale spin-off transactions and time-sharing algorithms; on the other hand, $HYPE was the only token that built a closed loop of complete value capture, and the increase crushed all targets in the market. The industry has introduced more than 10 types of token value capture mechanisms, but the vast majority of them have failed to form a positive cycle. The root cause is that the projects attached to these mechanisms themselves have no asset value. Instead, the industry first solved the technical problem of how tokens capture value before searching for physical assets worth carrying value.
This upside down in the industry is the underlying driver behind the boom in non-public perpetual contracts. What the market really wants is never perpetual contract products themselves, but high-quality assets; in 2026, the only high-quality assets that can be traded on the chain are synthetic income certificates for physical enterprises unrelated to the crypto industry.
End of 2026: No cryptocurrencies required on the AI circuit
Anthropic and OpenAI have achieved technological breakthroughs, competition on basic large-scale model racetracks is heating up, and the market has begun to price general artificial intelligence (AI) ahead of schedule. The ensuing ripple effect is that all non-leading basic model companies continue to flow out of related business capital. Capital is beginning to view generic AI as a core asset held on corporate balance sheets rather than a standardized tool popularized across the industry.
In such an environment, the “AI+ encryption” circuit is quietly declining. It's not that this set of logic has been falsified; the industry has no time to refute it. The x402 payment agreement was officially launched, but there were no paying users; the on-chain smart device economy imagined by the industry has never been able to be implemented on a large scale, and all existing smart devices are settled in US dollars through APIs, which is no different from the consistent model of the traditional software industry. Venture capital practitioners have reached a consensus: the AI industry itself does not need cryptocurrency to support it, and investors are no longer forcibly advocating this track.
Currently, the only “AI+ encryption” product that actually fits the product market is the only one that predicts the market. The scale of predicted transactions around the performance of major basic models is growing rapidly, and it has also become the most accurate financial instrument to bet on the core variables that can attract large amounts of money — which company will have the best performance model in the coming month.
Leaving aside the hustle and bustle of the trading market, another low-key change is taking place: when the CLARITY Act was passed by the Senate in mid-2026, the vast majority of traders thought the bill was irrelevant, and the market did not rise; however, by the end of the year, various asset tokenization projects were implemented at an accelerated pace. Large asset management agencies have fully moved from the pilot phase to formal operation, keeping a low profile and not doing publicity throughout the process — the core job of the compliance department is to avoid excessive project momentum. Tokenization targets are concentrated in mediocre balance sheet categories such as money market funds and private credit. These assets don't have KOLs singing a lot on social platforms, and there are no market K-lines to hype up.
At the end of 2026, the crypto industry split into two independent economies with little interaction: one is bustling and profits by betting on the AI circuit market; the other is silent and low-key, and is gradually being absorbed into the traditional financial system through a compliance document. The vast majority of practitioners are focused on the previous market.
Early 2027: Major public chain foundations clarify development routes
General-purpose public chains can no longer influence the source or obscure positioning.
Over the years, major mainstream foundations have always told the outside world two completely divided narratives: publicly announcing large-scale implementation visions for ordinary users, and focusing on supporting services for suitable institutions during private negotiations with organizations. The two sets of narratives have never intersected. By the beginning of 2027, the conflict between the two development paths was completely evident.
The track for retail investors is highly concentrated. It is the only retail product with real user needs, and the transaction volume is all concentrated on a few trading platforms; the institutional business is currently the only track that can bring stable paying customers. Major foundations have successively finalized the core development direction and chosen a high degree of uniformity: building corporate sales teams, supporting compliance services, launching a network-wide general compliance development kit for tokenized asset transfers and brokerage license processing, expanding Wall Street cooperation channels, and improving private transaction functions.
The media and cryptographic social networking platforms interpret every shift in strategy as a trade-off: giving priority to service institutions, abandoning ordinary retail investors, choosing serious financial customers, and abandoning speculative casino attributes.
However, the Foundation's internal practitioners did not agree with this interpretation. Instead, the team increased the layout of the encryption business for ordinary users, only changing the implementation logic. The accreditation threshold for qualified investors has continued to be relaxed over the years, and the number of eligible people has continued to expand. The infrastructure facilities built by the Foundation will be open to ordinary users who are not yet classified as “qualified investors” in a short time. The infrastructure team is well aware of this, but they just won't publicly announce it to the public. The compliance infrastructure team only talks about bank customers, because banks are the current payers.
Meanwhile, the low-profile institutional market formed at the end of 2026 ushered in an unprecedented increase: a large number of ordinary compliant investors in the future. The two major economies that were previously split have finally established a bridge of connectivity through the “Qualified Investor Qualification Verification.”
Mid-2027 to the end of the year: triple development ceiling
A new generation of science and innovation companies have made the private equity market popular again: artificial intelligence, physical artificial intelligence, and humanoid robot circuit financing have all been oversubscribed, and corporate valuations have skyrocketed, but it is still a few years until they all go public. The perpetual contract platform was launched in just a few weeks. The number of outstanding synthetic contract positions of these companies with low revenue set new records one after another. The 2026 market rules are once again in effect, and the capital volume is even larger: the world's most sought-after high-quality assets are all concentrated in the first-level private equity market. The only corresponding target that users can trade on the chain is a synthetic perpetual contract with a capital rate settlement every 8 hours.
However, each of the three types of markets hit the upper limit of development, limiting the industry's growth rate:
Non-public perpetual contract ceiling: Real private equity assets are growing steadily according to traditional private equity channels, and the scale continues to compound interest every quarter, and they have no presence on crypto social platforms that only watch the sharp rise in the market. The growth rate of perpetual contracts is far less than that of real private equity assets. The core limitation is that private equity securities cannot publicly solicit investors, and the crypto industry's best traffic model — market exposure to attract retail investors — cannot be applied to such assets at the legal level. At the same time, perpetual contracts have structural shortcomings: they require an event close to listing as a price driver, and can only cover late-stage mature companies; mid-term startups such as bioartificial intelligence and humanoid robots that are far from being able to exit channels indefinitely cannot launch corresponding synthetic contracts. For the vast majority of primary market targets, a real shareholding channel protected by regulation is not a suboptimal choice, but the only compliant and viable trading tool; however, the law does not allow public publicity.
Stablecoin ceiling: Total stablecoin circulation continues to rise steadily and has never stopped expanding, yet major institutions have quietly reduced their expansion plans. The midterm elections changed the power pattern of the National Assembly Committee. The list of candidates for the 2028 presidential election was gradually determined, and many popular candidates publicly opposed the issuance of private dollar tokens. Although the relevant provisions of the laws implemented in 2025 and 2026 have not been abolished, the power to implement the laws belongs to the new government. When formulating a ten-year settlement plan, financial managers of major banks must include the risk scenario where the next government's supervisory attitude will become stricter. The industry will not completely stop stablecoin projects; it will only prolong the implementation cycle and reduce the scale of the pilot. Everyone is waiting for the November 2028 election results. The speed of on-chain dollar circulation is completely tied to uncertainty at the policy level, and policy uncertainty is at a high level in mid-2027.
Asset tokenization ceiling: This conservative sentiment spreads across the institutional crypto market. Tokenized private credit and fund share products continued to be launched, and all were implemented in compliance, but the agency deliberately controlled the size of the project, and no one wanted to be the opposite case at the Senate hearing the following year.
The commonalities of the three types of racetracks are very clear: the logic of the product itself is established and market demand is fully verified, but external forces outside the industry limit the pace of development. Leaving aside the market standard of cryptocurrency's own sharp rise and fall, 2027 is actually a year of steady growth for the industry. It's just that the crypto industry has been used to it for ten years, and only a straight upward market can be considered successful.
2028: Compliance entry barriers are no longer scarce
(Since then, the accuracy of predictions has declined: the previous forecast was refined to the quarter, and after 2028 it was only deduced by year, and the range of prediction errors widened. This article clarifies a core assumption: the Democratic candidate won the November 2028 election. (If the election results are reversed, the timing of events in the industry will shift, but the overall development framework will not change.)
The speculative casino nature of the crypto market is gradually fading away, and almost no one can accurately define the inflection point. The market's capital harvesting mechanism is too efficient. Every round from 2026 to 2027 added less liquidity than the previous round, and funds were withdrawn faster by a few leading players. There were no iconic crashes in the market. Meme coin speculation will still occur intermittently, and the single-day market will skyrocket. However, after a certain point in the first half of 2028, speculative trading will no longer be the core focus of the industry. Trading volume only exists as statistics, and will no longer dominate the industry's ecological culture. Some traders are turning to predictive markets that take on the hype; some are left behind in the speculative sector, which continues to shrink in scale; and a large number of traders spent the past year completing what no one expected in 2026 — applying for accredited investor qualifications.
Panic at the policy level gradually dissipated with market pricing and continued throughout the year. Popular candidates from both major political parties are accepting donations from the industry, but the wording is different, and the core position is unified: the crypto industry needs regulation, not a complete ban. Practitioners who previously used the previous loose regulations as a harvesting window have been investigated one after another. The industry slowly realized that the regulatory clean-up of chaos is actually a positive sign: the government distinguishes between speculative harvesting operations and financial infrastructure, and only then can infrastructure receive reliable capital investment. Financial supervisors of the major banks that began the 2027 contraction pilot quietly resumed their capacity expansion plans before the general election; when the election results were implemented, the vast majority of policy risk premiums had already been absorbed.
The industry's most profound lesson in 2028 comes from the trading market that everyone is watching closely: at the top trading platforms at the beginning of the year, a large position sufficient to leverage the market, centrally closed positions on many popular non-public perpetual contracts, and the risk of chain liquidation, which the market has been concerned about since the Ventuals manipulation incident, has fully exploded. Billions of unclosed positions were cleared within a few hours, and the system automatically forced a reduction in positions. Losses were shared by the market, and profits were drastically reduced. Afterwards, all parties were unable to determine whether this fluctuation was due to malicious manipulation or a simple market accident, and this vagueness itself is the core conclusion: there is no fair benchmark price in a market without underlying spot anchoring; even a “manipulated market” cannot be defined, and there is no way to obtain evidence. Listed companies' perpetual contracts are subject to spot price restrictions, but non-public perpetual contracts have no underlying anchor. Real private equity shares do have compliant trading channels, but large-scale public circulation and extensive pricing are not allowed. The price of each perpetual contract is only estimated independently by the platform, and there is plenty of room for human intervention. This chain liquidation is not the failure of the synthetic contract market itself; it is an inevitable result of the operation of the market mechanism without the support of underlying real assets.
Over the past decade, the ban on public solicitation of private equity securities has been packaged as an investor protection policy. However, the current market storm proved that this rule only blocks ordinary investors from legally guaranteed trading channels, and instead allows everyone to pour into the highly leveraged, unsecured synthetic contract market. The real dividing line has never been between synthetic assets and real assets, but rather whether trading interests are legally enforceable.
After the thunderstorm, regulations introduced new regulations, which were not so much reforms as improving the underlying financial mechanism: guidelines were issued to allow qualified investors who have completed qualification checks to publicly promote private equity securities secondary market transfers (only second-hand shares, not including the first round of corporate financing), and the qualified investor base has continued to expand over the years. The logic behind it is very straightforward: the synthetic contract market requires an underlying price anchor. The lowest-cost solution is to liberalize the open circulation of real private equity assets
channel. A regulation restricting publicity that has been in use for 90 years has greatly relaxed the scope of application simply to improve the derivatives market.
The popularity of the first week of implementation of the new regulations was comparable to that of a new meme coin. The only difference was that the subject of the transaction was physical enterprise equity. The listing of second-hand private equity shares, screenshot dissemination, and community promotion have all been legalized. This is the first time in the history of this asset product category. Opinions on social platforms are polarized: half of the practitioners regard it as a new basic financial tool, while the other half are worried that retail investors will become takeovers from venture capital firms. The latter's intuition is correct, but the judgment lags behind the times: when the asset is just an air token with no physical support, this concern is true; however, the target of the transaction now is the perpetual contract market for the past two years to prove the profit rights of physical enterprises that the entire market craves.
Capital was the first to pour into late-stage mature companies where perpetual contracts have already proven popular; since actual shareholding has no capital rate and no time restrictions on listing, capital flows further to mid-term startups that cannot be covered by perpetual contracts. Perpetual contracts have not died out; they have transformed into a supplementary section for late-stage corporate transactions, and no longer occupy the entire core traffic of the market.
As of December, the industry ushered in a new round of bull market. What supported the market was the oldest basic target in the financial world, but now it has finally obtained legal circulation channels.
2029: The market becomes the only core main line of the industry
In the first year of the full implementation of this bull market, the trend was very different from previous crypto bull markets, and this difference is the core value. The targets of the continued rise in the market are all science and innovation enterprises that have landed in physical businesses and can actually create social value. The new basic asset class for ordinary users is private equity: biotechnology companies that have completed multiple rounds of clinical trials, humanoid robot manufacturers that have seen live demonstrations, artificial intelligence laboratories where everyone has traded perpetual contracts in 2026, and now users can directly hold real shares in the enterprise.
The threshold for qualified investors has been gradually relaxed for ten years, cultivating a new group of retail investors. Five years ago, only institutions could participate in assets, but now ordinary compliant investors can trade them, and the vast majority of people don't even classify such transactions as “cryptocurrency investments.”
The token circuit is completely divided along the core issues raised at the beginning of the article: successfully transformed into a public chain with new market issuance and settlement infrastructure to capture real business flows. Platform tokens are equivalent to proof of business cash flow revenue. All remaining tokens will face extremely realistic market rules: tokens that lack legally enforceable income rights and do not capture full value in a closed loop will not continue to decline for 18 months like 2026, but will simply completely lose transaction liquidity. The token value capture mechanism, which was constantly debated throughout the industry in 2026, did not win any set of solutions; the implementation of the circulation of private equity assets directly made this debate meaningless.
Stablecoins continued the development pattern throughout the cycle: they maintained steady compound interest growth, and there was no explosive rise. By the end of 2029, the total circulation volume had roughly doubled compared to mid-2027, with a steady annual growth rate of about 20%. The upper limit of the growth rate is not insufficient market demand, but rather a policy choice agreed upon by the two parties: private dollar tokens are moderately developed to meet practical needs while avoiding competition with the sovereign monetary system. The speed of on-chain dollar circulation is tied to policy certainty, and the 2029 policy environment is stable and sustainable for a long time.
The speculative sector still exists, shrinking into fixed segments, and there is occasional short-term hype, but the overall influence is only equal to a segment of the entertainment industry. Speculative traders are diverting to the prediction market, the new private equity secondary market, and there is another way no one can predict in 2026: apply for qualified investor qualifications.
The third core question raised at the beginning of this article — how to transform cryptocurrencies into traditional financial infrastructure — was ultimately answered in a silent manner: this question would completely lose the point of discussion. The clearing and settlement function relies on customized payment channels, public chains, or a mixture of the two. Only the operation team can sort out the details of the underlying structure. Ordinary participants neither understand nor care, just like ordinary people don't delve into the clearing agencies behind brokerage firms. Industry integration, which gradually began at the end of 2026, was finally implemented through “complete invisibility”. The ultimate victory for financial infrastructure is to become dull and unattended. What remains in the public eye is the core product that the crypto industry has actually been building since going through a round of speculation — the asset exchange market.
So far, the three core questions have all been answered through this set of deductive logic:
What determines the value of a token? An immutable core: the right to claim legally enforceable returns on real assets, and now the market is eliminating all tokens that do not meet this requirement.
How can cutting-edge technology integrate into the blockchain? Relying on the private equity primary and secondary market, the implementation was completed: science and innovation enterprises themselves do not need tokens; they only need trading and circulation channels; when channels obtain legal public publicity rights, cutting-edge enterprises naturally complete the implementation of on-chain transactions.
What will happen when cryptocurrencies become traditional financial infrastructure? There will be no iconic events, the underlying functions are completely abstracted, and the public will never discuss this proposition alone again.
Some of the inferences in the article are bound to be biased; this was explained at the beginning of the article. There is a core verification standard for the entire deduction logic: if by the end of 2028, ordinary investors still do not participate in legal channels for private equity assets, and all funds still rely on offshore synthetic perpetual contracts and packaged product circulation, then the core thesis of “the industry bottleneck is law rather than technology” does not hold up, and the entire deduction needs to be drastically reduced in credibility.
Just keep an eye on this one core variable and fully verify the rest of the judgments by 2029. I'd rather give clear, falsifiable predictions than speak vague and empty words that can never go wrong.
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